April Voila

I am amazed at how quickly April has rushed by. Here we are nearly half-way through the month! Unbelievable. We have been blessed with the most heavenly weather lately. Really. We have been able to open the windows in the evenings and blow cool air into the house*. Then in the morning when the sun comes up and the outside air starts to warm up we turn the fans off and close the windows. Then the rest of the day voila, we enjoy indoor temperatures in the 60's and 70's. It seems like heaven. Maybe the main reason it does is because we know that just around the corner we won't be able to enjoy the cool evening air - because there won't be any. Nope, just a few days or maybe weeks away (if we are lucky) are the warm/hot nights that will give no relief from the hot/hotter days. So we just take it day by day and try to enjoy it while we can.

In the old house we used the same spring/fall cooling method. We took an old box fan that we inherited from my mom. We put a stool below the driveway door. We carefully balanced some thick phone books and a box of food storage on the stool. Then we wedged the fan into the opened window. After opening a couple of windows in the house we would turn the fan on. That would blow air out of the house and suck cooler air in through the opened windows. It was a marvelous system. We had been doing it for about 25 years or so.

I remember thinking when we moved into the new house that we would get some fancy schmancy built in "whole house fan" system that we could just open a window and flip a switch and voila some powerful hidden fan would blow and the air would be cool and plentiful. Nothing like that has happened. Why? Mostly $$ or the lack of it. What we did though was make an improvement on the system we used at the old house - and it is working like a charm for a tiny fraction of getting a built in system. We bought 2 new 20" box fans. We needed more blowing power because we had a much bigger house. We attached them together, side by side, by using long zip ties. Then we turn them sideways and put them into an opened basement window. The fans just sit on the window sill with no need for stool or boxes or books. The blinds rest on top of the top fan so the fans are very secure. The very top part of the window that is empty is blocked by a precision cut piece of cardboard. We open a couple windows upstairs. Turn the fans on. And guess what? They probably work just as good or better than the built in system and we only paid $20 per fan. The system is flawless!

So like I said, in a short time we will have to dismantle our system and put it away until sometime in the fall when once again we will enjoy our heavenly weather.

*Note: Our system is flawless, however, our location is not. Our new house lies just a short mile away from a cattle farm. And sometimes we are pleasured with the scents of "fresh country air". When those odors float our way - we have to hastily abandon the open window fan system and just hope the smell "clears the air" quickly.