The art of procrastination

I hereby declare Rakal's First Law of Procrastination:

Procrastination time for a household task is inversely proportional to the amount of time the task will actually take.

Case in point: Some time ago, a bird tried to set up housekeeping in my bathroom exhaust fan vent. This came to my attention when I was startled out of a sound sleep one morning by the sound of something scrabbling around in (apparently) the ceiling. I finally traced the racket to the exhaust fan in the bathroom; the "something" was evidently in the exhaust duct.

By dint of banging on the fan housing and turning the fan on and off a few times, I got the something to leave -- temporarily. Over the next few days, it returned, and I drove it off, several times. I decided it had to be a bird, since the position of the vent on the back wall of the house, eight feet off the ground and about four feet in from the corner, didn't appear to be accessible to anything that couldn't fly. Sure enough, a little backyard reconnaisance revealed the bugger slipping out of the vent when it thought I wasn't looking. Time to take action.

I planted my stepladder under the vent, climbed up, and removed the typical aluminum flapper under an overhanging hood, with no screening to keep critters out; it was so beat up, the flapper didn't even close right. The duct was loaded with pieces of gras, pine straw, and other crap. It was evident that the original vent had been reinstalled -- badly -- after the house was vinyl-sided (shortly before I bought it). It was even more evident that it needed to be replaced with something that (a) closed properly and (b) had a critter guard.

So I pulled out as much of the crap as I could, and slapped a few strips of that old standby, duct tape, across the opening. Then I made the rounds of Lowes and Home Depot, and eventually bought a new louvered vent cover (seen at left) and a genuine Deflecto vent guard (above).

That was at least three years ago. Three years during which the louvered cover and the bird guard kicked around in the garage. Three years of not using the bathroom exhaust fan. Until finally, a few weeks ago, I noticed how much the duct tape had deteriorated, to the point of starting to peel off. Clearly, I had to do something before the birds again took up residence in the ductwork. I could either replace the duct tape with a fresh layer, or -- how's this for a radical idea? -- install the vent cover and guard. Either way, I'd have to haul the damned stepladder out there. So I bit the bullet and installed the three-year-old hardware. And ya know, even with having to enlarge the opening in the siding to get the vent cover in place, the whole thing took me all of three quarters of an hour.

After procrastinating for three years!