Lake Bluff, IL, June 15 – In yet another unsurprising feat of adequacy, the widow who refers to herself as “Ridiculouswoman” singlehandedly installed two window air conditioners in two bedrooms of her three bedroom home within the past 24 hours.
“Well, they’re not perfect–they’re supposed to angle down a little on the outside of the house,” said Ms. Ridiculous. “But if I did that, the hole in the bar you attach to the top of the machine that you’re supposed to drive a screw through to attach the damn thing to the window sash wouldn’t be flush and the small screws that came with the machine wouldn’t reach as far as they needed to go. So mansplain that one to me, guys.”
Upon inspection, it’s true that the air conditioners have the appearance of being dead level between the inside and the outside of the house, which could result in condensation failing to drain as designed.
“But I have a plan B,” Ridiculous added. “I ordered two support brackets that don’t need any screws or drilling at all and that are adjustable to provide the correct backward slant. They’re not coming until Monday, but it’s supposed to be near 90 degrees tomorrow and I had to do something quick. I’ll switch to the brackets after this heat wave passes.”
Having lived through many a sweltering summer in a vintage home that lacks central air conditioning and features highly efficient hot water heat (radiators, not ducts), Ridiculous reports she decided that given the direction the climate is going, it was time to cave and add a few bedroom window air conditioning units.
“I really don’t like air conditioning. It’s always too cold and if feels so fake. And when the heat is oppressive, our house stays nice and cool if we close in cool air from the days before a heat wave is supposed to hit, and keep the drapes closed.
But upstairs, it’s another story. It gets hot up there and the window fans just don’t cut it anymore. Our basement stays nice and cool, but mice, spiders, and some kind of weird, high-jumping cricket type insect seem to enjoy cooling themselves down there too. So I figured it was time to bite the bullet and use artificial means to cool the bedrooms to a reasonably tolerable temperature during a heat wave. At least the machines I got are supposed to be energy efficient.”
Having recently stepped up to 15 pound dumbbells from the 10 pounders that no longer felt like a challenge, Ridiculous credits her recent years of resistance training, including squats, rows, tricep extensions, lunges, and “some weird sidewinding thing called a Russian twist” for her ability to hoist the 40-plus pound machines into the windows and hold them there while swearing profusely about her lack of a cordless drill (“why the fuck do they have to keep changing the type of battery for those things?”). Undaunted, she simply used her screwdrivers to get the required screw holes started.
“Yeah, I was supposed to drill holes first to keep the window frame from splitting. But with my new arm strength it was easy to bear down on my manual screwdriver to get the screws in as deep as they needed to be. And the window frames only split a tiny bit.”
She added, “I’ll figure out how to fill the holes and patch the splits in the fall when I take the machines out and stow them back in their cartons (yes, of course I saved the packaging–what do you take me for? A guy who doesn’t read instructions? Because although I didn’t need the reminder, it was right there in the instructions, in ALL CAPS and BOLD: SAVE THE PACKAGING).
There are also a lot of warnings about how FLAMMABLE and DANGEROUS the coolant in those machines is, so I had to take a break to have an OCD panic attack and map out a strategy for calling a hazmat team if one of these machines falls out a window despite my best efforts to secure them. So that took some extra time.”
Ms. Ridiculous expressed her intention to endure the coming heat wave by “holing up in my bedroom with a six pack or a bottle of Oregon Riesling on ice while I stream a bingeable historical series” until temperatures ease “and I can set the things on ‘fan’ and go back to living in natural summer air.”
“Look, I’m in no position to pay somebody to do something I’m still able to do myself, and I’m not comfortable asking for help. If I do it myself, it won’t be pretty, but it’ll be….adequate. And so far the air conditioners haven’t tripped a circuit breaker or started a fire. So there’s that.”
Steeling myself to endure a heat wave with artificially chilled air, cold showers, and cold drinks, I remain,
your do-it-herself-and-pray-the-old-wiring-and-the-newer-windows-can-handle-it,
Ridiculouswoman
Ms, Ridiculous is a heroine in my book and many years later I can still hear the creative vocabulary issuing from my husband’s mouth during the the yearly insertion and removal of the air conditioning units in our two offices. Had I still been living in our old house, with passive solar cooling and heating as it was, I doubt this summer could withstand the heat waves that are coming our way. Congrats and stay cool.
congrats! I have to get back to my weights now that my bee sting is gone. I’m still at 10 Ibs.
This will be my third summer in Michigan and so far the first one where I’ve felt like the heat and the humidity were becoming unbearable. Someone told me today that this is not unusual and should only last for a couple of weeks. Fingers crossed that’s true, but with overall global warming and current heat dome situation, I’m not hopeful!
When I had a spouse, I was often his holder-upper and/or tool-hander for jobs like this. Since I no longer have a spouse, my replacement I guess now handles those usually thankless but necessary duties.
Since I had a spouse for 30 years, I decided I would never even attempt these things on my own and therefore will never own my abode ever again. As I am relatively comfortable asking for help the fact that I will have a property manager to ask for any and all more than minor home-maintenance and repair tasks.
I wish I could say the same about my currently in-process move. My Angelic Daughter is not willing to recruit muscle and/or vehicle to move the very few pieces of sort of heavy furniture I now own, so I have been forced to hire a professional or two for what should be one hour or so at a cost of $150-250 which I can thankfully afford.
Like you, though, I have been muscling most of the small and/or lightweight stuff myself. My AD has done many more moves, mainly on her own, than I have, especially in the last few years. Her suggestion to use rolling suitcases has been priceless. She even has a few that she loaned me, along with many Amazon and other online shipping boxes, that she has kept for just this purpose!
Well, good on you, HB! The kicker for me is that even if my spouse were still around, it would be me taking on this task – my late husband was one of those guys who refused to read instructions, and would quit with the task unfinished at the first instance of frustration – (except that one time he assembled an enormously complicated working model roller coaster, mostly just to prove he could, and also because he wanted to play with it with our “AG”).
During one of Chicagoland’s worst past heat waves in the aughts, with three consecutive days over 100 degrees, I brought a small air conditioner over from my Mom’s house, only to wind up in an intense argument about securing it in the window with a bracket or screws so it wouldn’t fall on someone on the patio below, the result of which was me just packing the thing up again and schlepping it back to Mom’s. I stayed over there with AG in Mom’s central air, and my husbad stayed at our house, sitting on the deck in his bathing suit with a bucket of cold water that he dumped over his head from time to time.
The Plan B was actually easier to install but one of the air conditioners (the one in my room) looks oddly tilted down toward one side and I’m not sure it is angled backward enough – so next year I’ll put it in the window above the patio, secured in such a way that it won’t fall on anyone (fingers crossed!) We’ve had two days of merciful east breezes off the lake and temps btwn 66 and 74, but tomorrow, back up to 90. Fortunately we’ve filled the house with those cool lake breezes and that should keep it reasonably cool in the house for a few more days.
Summer must be endured until glorious October — but if climate change takes my Octobers away, I will be inconsolable…not to mention hot and broke from what I’m sure will be heart-stopping electric bills. Sigh.