Our basement duct work was confusing. It went from a bigger duct that was tucked in the rafters to a 6″ arm then down to another 6″ arm. Both arms feed into the same room. The glorious cool or warm air was being pumped into the same space through a highway of confusing configuration. So when we made plans to finish the basement ceiling we definitely didn’t want to build around this mess.

Something had to be done 🙂

But we have never worked with ducts before. We googled it of course.

Took off the insulation. Found out that the first arm could be removed and we could use that existing hole for a vent to feed into this basement “bedroom”.

So Jer yanked that sucker out and we took that bendie arm into Home Depot as well as the photo above for the experts there to tell us what we need. We figured they must make some kind of T part so that we could fit all the arms together.

It was pretty self explanatory – like fitting straws together so you can shoot a spitwad really far distances. Someone had to crimp the edges of the metal so one side could slide into the other. And because I actually have crimping experience, I volunteered. (yes, I am a child of the 80’s)

See how they slide together. Jeremy then used the self piercing screws to fasten them up.

Now we had a decent intersection instead of two random arms. We tested upstairs to make sure we were still getting the air flow from both vents – SUCCESS! Plus this configuration allows us to build a dropped ceiling closest next to only one wall instead of trying to build the ceiling around chaos.

The boyfriend got his trusty duct tape out – this was actually the first time using Duct Tape on ducts, mind you!

All we need now is to wrap the duct insulation around the fixed area and we are on our way to starting our basement ceiling.

The project ran us around $75 dollars but only cause we bought the registers for the new basement bedroom and because we decided to replace the insulation instead of recycling the old stuff. Hey insulation is a tax write off people!

The question now – is there a special method for disposing of old insulation or will the regular trash guys handle it?