All the little Duckies in a Row!

Clean Furnace Ducts
Sort Garage Sale Stuff
Driving Adventure-Friday
Made Chocolate Pumpkins

OK, ok, not Ducks, but ducts.  Don't remember if I told you that we had someone come give us an estimate on duct cleaning.  What a scam that was.   We called on one of those coupons you always see in the mail.  $89 for cleaning 8 ducts and $45 for any others.  Figured that was a good deal, even though we have 9 ducts.

 

We moved everything away from the ducts in each room.  And cleared out the hall closet so they would have excess to the attic.  Two men showed up.  One climbed up his ladder and stuck his head in the attic...never really went all the way up and was up there about 30 seconds.   He came down and shook his head and left.  The other man said that if the seams in the ducts were not securely taped that the cleaning equipment would bust them apart; ours were not taped.

He and Bruce sat in the dining room chatting about everything under the sun as he was writing up an estimate to replace all the ducts.  45 minutes later he said it would cost about $1,800 to replace the ducts but if he called and had a crew available to do it that day, he could knock $200 off of that.  Bruce said that he would have to get other estimates and would probably end up doing it himself.  The guy was gone in a flash.  Bruce went up in the attic to take a look and every duct was wrapped in insulation; the type with the foil on the outside.  There was no way the guy could have even seen a seam.

You just have to be careful with who you are dealing with.  For $32 we bought a dryer vent cleaning kit.  It has 5 long plastic rods that hook into your electric drill.  There are two brush types.  Though they are smaller than the ducts, by bending one into the right shape it seemed to work fine.  I held up the shop vac hose while Bruce ran the brushes through each duct.  Took us a little over an hour.  They are now clean.  No problem.

We had just the opposite thing happen with the new car guy we found down here.  Won't bore you with the details, but are happy to have found this guy.

Friday we took a ride up to Lake Piru.  We were hoping to find a place close for camping.  The sites were horrible, no room for a tent and were on top of each other.  Disappointing.  But we had a nice ride.  After leaving the lake we decided to cross the freeway (126) and head home the long way.  After driving towards the hills for awhile we turned and paralleled the freeway.  There were orchards and nurseries between us and the freeway and we were up along side the hill.  Ran into some road work and had to stop.  Before we knew it there was a "pilot car" (truck actually) ahead of us leading us down the road.  This went on for about 15 miles.  Single lane, no one behind us.  When we got to the end, there were about 5 cars patiently waiting to be taken back the other direction.  We hoped that we could still continue on home and didn't have to make the guys take us back again.  We found our way and ended up in Moorpark which is on the other side of Camarillo.  It was a fun drive.

I'm still trying to get over a cold, so didn't do much today.  I did make some chocolate pumpkins for Alissa's purse party tomorrow.   They turned out nicely.  It was fun to "make" something.  I miss making stuff for parties and guests.

Bruce sorted through the "storage" bedroom and separated things for another garage sale.  Have to pick a date.  Alissa is going to bring things over to add to it.  Mostly it's just all the antiques.  We're tired of storing them.  It's too hard dealing with auction houses.