CK and Nate header: Installing the Hood

I feel quite behind on the kitchen updates but after a much needed blogging break, I'm now ready to share with you the abundance of projects we've been working on. Well, that's a little bit of a lie... I am now ready to take a ton of pictures of the projects we've been working on. I've been really slacking on taking photos which has been the major reason for the lack of posting. For example, this post will contain entirely pics taken from my iPhone since I was too lazy to grab my actual camera.

One project we weren't really looking forward to in the kitchen renovation was installing the exhaust system for our hood. We think it's a little silly to have a hood that just blows right back into the kitchen and since we managed to snag such an awesome hood, there was no way we weren't going to vent it properly. The reason we weren't looking forward to doing this was because it required running an 8 inch diameter vent pipe through over 10 ft of joists above our kitchen ceiling... blind (since we weren't pulling our ceiling down for this). Just think of it as threading a very long needle.

Nate got ready for this by first drilling a (rather large) hole in the side of the house after measuring very carefully to make sure he was in the correct bay (no need for swiss cheese siding). He also had to knock a lot of debris out of the way to slide the vent through without catching.

The next tricky part was making sure that the vent stayed together while we tried to slide it into place. Nate riveted the pipe sections together and then used aluminum foil tape on all the seams. Once it was sturdy, we placed one end of the vent in the hole in the side of the house and then while I held the far end up with a very long stick (so it was level with the ground) Nate pushed the vent into the hole. It took a couple of tries, but we eventually got the vent in place.

The outside of the vent had a vent cap attached so that once the vent was pushed all the way in, the hole on the outside was sealed off by the cap and the only time it opens is when the vent is on.

The inside end of the vent had a joint attached to it which, when twisted, formed a 90˚ angle. This allowed us to put the vent into the hole with the joint straight and then once it was in place, it could be twisted to be joined up with the vent coming up from the hood. We called it a night after Nate successfully twisted the joint to the proper position.

Fast forward a few hours and the hood was attached. This was super tricky since it really required 6 hands and we only had four (and hence no pics of that actual process). The way we did this minus two hands was to slide the stainless steel covers onto the frame and attach them all the way at the top. Then we fed the hood into place and while Nate held the hood, I dropped the covers to the lowest position to feed make sure the vent from the hood fed into the vent in the ceiling. I couldn't quite get it so I had to hold the hood up while standing on the counter while Nate climbed up and helped. Once we got it in, Nate took over holding the hood while I slid the covers to the top most position and attached the hood to the brace.

At this point the hood finally was secure so I could get down and take some pics while Nate lowered the covers once again and used the aluminum tape to seal the transition from hood vent to ceiling vent.

And after all that up and down, the covers finally were attached in their respective positions (which we were super happy about since those buggers are heavy!!

You may be wondering what's going on with the ceiling... I'll explain that later.

Here is the view from the kitchen into the rest of the house with the completely install hood! Please ignore the sneak peak of the granite installed since the camera phone really doesn't do it justice.

Here is a view of the whole peninsula. We had only seen the hood installed without the covers up to this point and I must say the covers make a HUGE difference. I'm really in love with this kitchen setup and the hood is just amazing (and for you who are wondering if it works since we got it on Lowe's clearance, it works really really well).

Getting the hood installed checked a ton of things off our big kitchen list but only scratches the surface of what we accomplished over the last week. I'm even thinking there will be a final kitchen reveal in the very near future!