After a full seven days of very hard work, the Ventwerx crew were finally done with demolishing our old furnaces and getting our new Fujitsu units installed and running. (If you missed the last six posts about this project, it sounds like an extremely long time, but half of that time was spent ripping out the old 50-year-old diesel setup the house was literally built around.
They were a great crew, and as such, we actually took a picture of all of them after they packed up and were ready to head to their next job. A testament to how much we liked them: I can still remember all their names. Below, from left to right: Jose, George, Bull, Mikey and Alex. (I do hope I remember them correctly.)
Since this project wrapped, we had only one minor issue, which was actually pretty amusing. We didn’t turn on the new unit in the guest room for a couple months–after this project wrapped I took the opportunity to paint the guest room walls (more on that very soon). So our first houseguest slept on the guest bed in the downstairs of the great room, something said guest found quite fun as there is quite a bit of privacy from the rest of the house since it’s down three steps and the central chimney column and hearth wings act as partial walls. It wasn’t until a friend from Texas stayed a few weeks later and turned on the A/C in the guest room (I had finished painting everything but the giant tree in there–more on that soon too I promise) that we discovered a most peculiar smell. It was quite sewery in nature and didn’t seem normal.
I made a call to Alex, who dispatched George, who checked everything and couldn’t find anything wrong with the wall unit. George then called Bull and asked if he remembered connecting that unit to the sewer line with a p-trap. Turns out that is the only unit out of 9 not venting its condensation to the sewer, so it got missed. George got to venture under the house for a few minutes of tinkering and voila!–we turned on the AC and everything drained properly. It’s been almost two years since then and very smooth sailing.
A couple of days later a couple of drywall guys arrived to seal up all those holes in our walls. They did some extra patching for me in the boys’ space and cleaned up two of the holes I tried to patch using that mesh stuff from Home Despot. Word to the wise: don’t use that crap. Buy yourself a small piece of actual drywall, go to YouTube or your favorite DIY site and learn to cut a drywall patch, and slip it into the gaping hole you wish to fill–anything the size of my fist or bigger, and I have tiny fists.
They patched up all the holes where return vents once were and where the old thermostats resided. In our bedroom, they not only patched up the return vent and the big hole made during install, but also filled in the holes left by the previous owners who once had a giant flatscreen TV on the wall, in case they had to leave the master bathroom where a second one was mounted. I kid you not.
Once the patches cured it was super easy for me to paint over them, and it’s now as if there were no holes of any sort in the walls ever. The exception to this is our bedroom, which, at the time of this writing, is still the same horrible pukey-brown color that most of the house was when we moved in. And we still have white drywall patches that definitely stand out, but our room is now the last room in the house that needs “seen to.” We have rather extensive plans for it compared to what we’ve done elsewhere–nothing super extreme, but if all goes well, we’ll turn the closet hallway leading to the bathroom into a proper walk-in closet and changing the layout of things a bit.
Thus concludes the almost-epic tale of the furnace replacement project. Next up…well, there was a bit of an aftermath.