As the temperatures here have dipped into the frigid upper fifties, the furnace has kicked in. But the heat hasn’t seemed to be reaching the family room, dining room and living room. The bedrooms and bathrooms are warm, but those are the rooms where the heat is least necessary. Those are rooms with down comforters and hot water. It’s the rooms we live in where the heat was lacking.  

The logical conclusion was that there was something wrong.  

All indications pointed to ducts, or what the professionals call the air duct system. It followed that someone had to go into the attic, and that someone was going to be me. 

The access to the attic is through the ceiling (no surprise there) of the coat closet in the hall. That means removing everything in the closet to be able to get the step ladder in. And since there’s nothing stored in the attic, and there is no basement, calling it a coat closet is something of a misnomer. Emptying the closet filled the living room. You know Parkinson’s Law; that work expands to fill the time allotted? The same is true of closets, with space instead of time. That is Prichett’s Law.  

Now, I have not been in the attic in several years. I mean several, like twelve or fifteen years. On what may have been the last occasion I was stringing new coax cable from the TV jacks around the house, back to where the cable comes into the house. In trying to feed the cable down the wall, I got a bit too close to where the roof meets the eave, and located a roofing nail with my scalp.  Coming back down the ladder with my blood-soaked t-shirt wrapped around my head, was not a pretty sight. Fortunately, not much damage was done to the cable, the roof, or my head. 

That was the most recent misadventure in the attic. There is, after all, nothing in the attic, except attic. At that time, it had the requisite Southern California paper-thin layer of insulation between the rafters. Since then, we had looked into increasing that layer to keep cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and were convinced to have insulation blown-in. I had not seen the results. 

Shining a light ahead of me, I poked my head into the attic and must have looked like Sid in Ice Age. A blizzard had happened. All it lacked was a chairlift to have been Lake Placid. This should have been my first clue.  

If memory serves, there is a sheet of plywood in the attic, which was apparently placed there either before there was a ceiling or before there was a roof. I couldn’t see it now, but reckoned it was somewhere in the vicinity of the 90-meter jump. As I made my way toward said plywood, creeping on hands and knees from rafter to rafter, moving a table lamp along with me, I tried to figure out where I was. It was easier when I could actually see and locate ceiling light fixtures and the like. Now, it all seemed much smaller than I remembered. (The opposite of many of my memories). And it was just snow wherever I looked. 

Not exactly snow of course. It wasn’t cold and it didn’t melt. Those were the assets. The drawbacks, in addition to covering everything about a foot and a half deep, was that I couldn’t breathe. I never thought I would say this, and I don’t mean it the way it sounds, but thank you coronavirus. With a supply of KN95 masks at the ready, I was able to crawl around the attic without contracting fiberglasstosis, or whatever it’s called, if that’s a thing.   

Anyway, about four feet farther than I thought it should be, I located the plywood and shortly after that, a glimpse of a duct. I followed the duct across the plywood and in due course found the problem. Somehow, though it had been untouched for 30-some years, the duct had become separated. The portion coming from the furnace was a good foot from the next section, which led to the family room vent. How this happens, I have no idea, but it meant that if there was any heat at all getting to the family room, it was purely a coincidence.  

The next step in the Bob Vila handbook after locating the problem, is to fix it. All I had to do was pull the two parts back together and secure them in place. This is, of course, the part where Bob steps back and says “Richard, how are you going to handle this?” and Richard mumbles some nonsense about humidity and air velocity before recommending hiring an expert. Well, I was already up here. How hard could it be?  

It seems the break in the line was beyond the end of the plywood and in a section where the rafters were no longer evenly spaced because, well, who knows why. But my reach challenged my balance and vice versa, meaning I was now in the ice arena part of the building and on two occasions, dangerously close to doing a triple Lutz through the ceiling. And while it appeared that they had come apart quite neatly, the two pieces of pipe didn’t want to go back together as easily. Or at all.  

I struggled with it until I exhausted my entire profanity vocabulary, got the two pieces somewhat assembled, and then adopted the “any change is an improvement” philosophy, before retreating back toward the ski lodge. We checked the vent and while the heat was not pouring out, it was recognizable as heat. And was better than it had been. Chalk one up.  

The living room and dining room will have to wait for the next foray. Or, we’ll use them only in the summer. Who uses their living room anyway? There’s no TV in there.  

Over the years, I have patched air mattresses and inflatable pool floats, secured the wiring of a broken radio antenna inside the trunk of a 1995 Honda, and wrapped the occasional Christmas present, but this is the first, and likely the last time I have used duct tape on an actual duct.