More fun with spray paint

I thought I'd cut right to the before and after pictures and then show you all the fun work that went on behind the scenes. A few weeks ago we did a mini-renovation of our main bathroom. You already saw one result that took very little effort and here's another. When we were done, I found myself wondering why we didn't do it sooner.

Here's the before picture (it's from a while ago, because I actually forgot to do a true before picture the day of the project). The tile and accents are, as you can see, bold black and white. And yet the vent fan was a dirty mustard yellow. It bothered me, and buying a new vent has been on my to-do list for a while.

It will probably come as no surprise to anyone who has owned an older home that when I checked the measurements of the ceiling box, I found they did not match anything I could find on the market.

Yay for the magic of spray paint!!! Here the vent is again, this time in a nice white:

It makes such a big difference, even though the plastic area for the light bulb is a little singed and brownish. Definitely blends in better with the ceiling.

Now for the work on parts of the vent that you can see--when we took the cover off, this was the dusty mess that awaited us.

But we didn't stop there (that was as far as I had gone a few years ago when I painted the ceiling). We pulled off the whole contraption. We did it for a few reasons: to clean it, to measure it and see if we could find a replacement (see above--no, we couldn't), and to find out if the vent actually went anyway. We suspected that it didn't, given the fact that the upstairs vent within 2 feet of the roof didn't lead anywhere either.

Lo and behold, we were unfortunately right. In fact, the wood jousts are arranged as to actually block the space and lead air AWAY from the soffit (we expected, if anything, for the vent to lead out the soffit since the back wall of the bathroom is an outer wall). Three sides are stopped up.

The good news is that the house is 60 years old and there was no sign of wood rot or mold. And since we don't plan to use that bathroom regularly anymore for showers, we decided that this venting problem could be safely ignored. Hope I don't eat my words in a few years!