Maintenance on the Old Homestead

I've learned a lot in the past six years of owning a home in rural America. You can't always get a reliable Handyman to do maintenance. Nor can you always get a reliable Installer to install something you've purchased.

Example 1.

When we bought this house, it came with a huge microwave oven over the electric range. Since we had a smaller microwave, one with a lot of power and a moving turntable, we never used the over-the-range monster.

So, one day we went to our local appliance store and picked out a nice over-the-range hood with fan. The installer was a local person sent by the appliance store. Up to that point, I merely trusted that the installer knew what he was doing. Flash forward to after the work's been done. Something immediately went wrong with the fan in the hood, and since the product was under warranty, the applicance store where I'd purchased said hood arranged to have an installer come from the nearest big city to check out the fan and fix it or replace the hood.

The big city installer did come to my home, and he did replace the fan in the hood. Nice. Made me feel good that I'd purchased a name brand appliance. However, the big city installer mentioned that the hood was not vented properly. Seems as though the original owner of the house had removed the vent (reason unknown) and let the old monster microwave vent into the attic. So, the current hood was doing the same...venting into the attic with (as the big city installer told me) all the grease and gunk going up there. Would it catch fire? No, the B=C=I said, but it would attract insects and varmints. Ahhh, I thought, the old I and V problem.

After learning of that fiasco, why didn't the installer sent by the appliance store do the job right, I wondered? I called the appliance store and was told that that's the way they always did it, saying their own house had a hood that was vented into the attic.

Well, to make a long story even longer and more horrific, before I knew all this, I had that same appliance store installer remove my existing double wall oven and install a new one. Little did I know that it, too, was not vented to the outside....until the day I decided to roast some veggies and found all the smoke venting into the kitchen.

This may sound like a homeowner's nightmare, but there is a silver lining. A very reliable roofing company is putting a new roof on our garage, and when they're finished, I will ask them if they can install new vents and get them vented to the outside without totally tearing up the roof on my house.

To be continued . . . .