Found! A Better TP Dispenser!

The O-Folk once lived in Japan many, many moons ago, and fell in love with their gadgets, the best of which, and one that we could afford to bring back with us, was this toilet paper dispenser. When the roll runs out, all you have to do is lift up on the empty core and two little swing arms let it pop right off. Then you push a new roll up through the spring arms, and they snap into the core. Presto! Chango! Even the O-Folk can handle that.

We liked these so much, we bought two, but the most frustrating thing about moving is that the things you're most looking forward to as you unpack are stashed away in the last box you open. These dispensers were in a box that's been shoved way to the back of a shelf all these years. I didn't find them again until tonight and was so pleased by the discovery that I installed it straight away.

The simplest things are the ones we treasure, right?

Back to work!

Sort of looks as though I knew what I was doing, doesn't it? In fact, this is a textbook example of looks being deceiving. If I'd had any idea what I was doing, the vent would be flush with the soffit and I wouldn't have been forced to cover the hole I cut in the wrong place with a piece of plywood.

There's a thick wooden joist just to the right of the vent, and another one to the left. I cut a neat, round hole right under the wooden joist, where it would be impossible for the plastic housing of the vent to stick up into the attic, much less to allow room for me to connect the exhaust hose to the vent.

So I cut the piece of plywood and mounted the vent in it, figuring on cutting an oblong opening into the soffit. The plywood would cover the irregular hole, I figured, and it did, but my next problem was that, after opening the hole in the soffit, I found that the angle of the joist left a triangular hole an inch and a half wide through which I could barely see the exhaust hose.

Insert a lot of cussing here.

At first it didn't seem possible that I could pull an exhaust hose four inches wide through the triangular gap, but my frustration had reached the point where I could have pulled a bowling ball through that gap. The hose was a thin plastic membrane over a wire coil, nothing like a bowling ball. It turned out to be flexible enough that I managed to sneak it through by shoving my hand into the dank, mildew-clogged hose to get ahold of it, and inch it, bit by laborious bit, through the gap. After ten minutes or so of that I ended up with a neck just long enough to connect to the vent.

The rest went more or less smoothly. I took My Darling B around to the front of the house to show her my handiwork and fed her the "looks are deceiving" line.

"I sort of figured the plywood was covering up an oops," she said, so maybe it doesn't look quite as much like I knew what I was doing as I'd like it to.