I don’t have any good pictures handy to illustrate this, but let’s just say that our kitchen is suffering from a lack of natural lighting. It’s got a one small south-facing window, but it’s flanked by two cupboards and really doesn’t provide much light to the room. There’s a nice east-facing window, but it has an eave and is largely blocked by our garage and trees. Removing the eave would help, but the previous owner left us a note saying that a family of house finches nests in there every spring – we looked, and sure enough there’s a nest… How much fun will spring be, eating at our breakfast nook and watching baby birds growing up?? More fun than removing an eave.

So I’ve been investigating skylights, specifically tubular ones, more exactly a brand called Solatube. They’re an Australian company that’s been around since the early 90’s and has really got the product "right" – lots of good technology being used to capture every ray of sunlight and send it down the reflective tube into a nice diffuser for what looks like fantastic natural lighting. More importantly for our needs, they offer an attached ceiling vent with the 10" model – it’s a circular intake that surrounds the diffuser and gathers the air into a separate venting tube. The fan is attached to the roof for quieter operation, another bonus. We could really use a vent in the kitchen for various cooking exploits – the main floor fire alarm is incredibly sensitive – and especially to suck out some of the vapor from the 60+ minute boils for homebrewing. I doubt there’s any immediate risk, but I get antsy seeing that much humidity on the cupboards and walls when I’m boiling, especially with winter coming and the windows closed.

But we’re down to the wire now, weather-wise. I’d really like to get this in before we get any snow and it’s freezing all the time, but that means this weekend or next. This weekend is filling up with halloween stuff, and next weekend I’ve got a presentation at a conference in Boston, so… Maybe I’ll take a day off work next week and do it then?

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