One of the side effects of having cats – especially indoor-only cats – is having to deal with the litter box. Houses usually are not built with special ventilated rooms to accommodate these things, and if you’ve got only one or two cats you can maybe get away with stuffing a box back behind the toilet and hoping air fresheners will do the trick. But we’ve got six cats and we’ve got three very large litter boxes (they are actually not litter boxes at all, but large high-sided plastic storage bins, and they work great) and the best place to stash those boxes in this house is the laundry room. It’s tiled, for one thing, and narrow, but with a space that was the perfect size for setting big boxes side by side, out of the way. Richard installed a cat door a few months ago, and that’s helped cut down on how far they can fling the litter (I have come to the conclusion that there is no litter box ever invented from which a determined cat cannot find *some* way to ‘help’ the litter escape), but there’s been one issue remaining. The smell. Regular scooping and cleaning helps keep it down to a minimum but the way the house is laid out, the laundry room is right next to the stairs, and, well, heat rises, and that creates a natural pull of air up those stairs, carrying with it a faint bouquet of eu de cattery.

So we got to thinking. The problem here is that air from the laundry room is moving back into the rest of the house. Seems like the best way to fix that problem is create a situation where air is being pulled *into* the laundry room *from* the house (it turns out high school physics was good for something after all!). And the most logical way to accomplish that was to have an exhaust fan installed in the laundry room. So one of the things high on our list of stuff for our contractor to get done, now that we no longer have the old house to worry about and can focus on the ‘new’ one, was to get that fan installed ASAP.

We keep forgetting about one of the most exciting parts about living in a nearly 100 year old house. It’s full of surprises. The contractor came over this morning, fan and tools in tow, and after we exchanged pleasantries, he headed downstairs and got to work. He pulled out his trusty stud finder and figured out where would be the best place to situate the exhaust fan and its vent, and very carefully measured and cut a nice big hole in the ceiling to accommodate it, and if this was a newer house, having never been raised several feet off its foundation to turn a basement into a full first story, this might have been no problem at all. But as he discovered, when they raised the second story, they added a ceiling for the first story. The studs for the kitchen, which is right over the laundry room, run one direction. The new ceiling, whose studs he was registering on his stud finder, has studs that run the opposite direction. Threading any sort of venting between those two layers (and fighting past a rather impressive spiderweb of piping and wires that come from a house that’s had lots of changes over the years) was just not going to happen.

The good news is that eventually he figured out a new place to work in the venting, even if it took a lot longer than he’d anticipated (what with having to work around two sets of studs) and we have our exhaust fan. It vents continuously. There is no switch to turn it on or off. As he noted, the engine in this thing is pretty basic, so if at some point it wears out, it’ll be a snap to just pop out the old one and pop in a replacement. You can hear a faint hum if you’re standing at the top of the stairs, and it’s also faintly audible when you’re in the downstairs guest room, but it’s the sort of noise that is very easy to ignore. And the very best part is that it works, exactly as we had hoped. One more important task off the long list. Phew.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.