alleviate the draftiness...

One of the things that we wanted to do when we bought this house was to alleviate the draftiness.

We spend a lot of time in the basement since that is where we have our office and computer.  It's been very cold down there.  Sometimes we wear coats.  Not nice.

Jerome was doing some investigating and found some major drafts in certain corners of the basement, so he went to Lowe's and purchased some insulation and some Great Stuff.  He was busy applying that stuff and decided to investigate further.

Needless to say, the basement is now a wreck.  He's moved a bunch of ceiling tiles and after a lot of head scratching, found that the cold air return that is supposed to run up to the bedrooms & dining room is not attached to the furnace in any way...and hasn't been since the owners (whomever they may be) finished the basement.

The duct stops here...at a rafter.  It does not connect to the furnace.

Could this be a reason that the bedrooms and the basement are so darn cold?

After removing many, many ceiling tiles, we figured out how this needs to be addressed and hopefully this will be a very quick fix...and free.  We will be moving some of the ductwork over a few rafters and close up some holes - and things should start working better after that.

A couple of years back, we had a company come out to clean the ducts because a chipmunk fell into the ductwork and died...and the smell was tremendous!  They claimed to have cleaned all the ducts and yet they never told us that these ones were not attached to anything.  They never found the chipmunk either.  We did.  Yuk.