Floor Registers

After this weekend, we realized that some projects probably shouldn’t have waited for winter. It started out innocently enough—I simply wanted to clean our floor registers. I had cleaned out the intake ones right when we moved in because it was a simple task to lift them out of the floor and clean underneath. Now that we had a small shop vac—and it was, after all, time for winter projects—I wanted to remove them all, wash them, and vaccum up all the accumulated dust. Imagine our surprise when we opened the two vents in the kitchen and found them full of plaster.

Now, we take full credit for that Nurf dart but it took us a few minutes to realize where the rest of it came from. Our kitchen had obviously been redone and the old plaster replaced with drywall. It looks like they simply let all the plaster shards drop to the floor, never bothering to cover the vents or clean them out afterwards. We started scooping and ended up with about a half of bucket full of the stuff.

Just doing the math makes one wonder. The kitchen remodel was done, not by the previous owner, but the owner before her. That would mean the renovations were done sometime between 2000 and 2004 and that gravel was in those vents for over a decade—a decade of breathing in the dust, a decade of brushing it off tabletops, a decade of never doing a deep cleaning of the house.

Do they look cleaner now? Sure, although they’re still clearly old and well worn. The more important point is that we feel much cleaner now.