Well that only took 4 months

Back in July, two weeks after the kitchen remodel was done, our air conditioner crapped out. We spent the next two weeks trying to suck in cold air from the hallway outside the apartment, which was unsatisfactory, to say the least (July in DC: horrible cesspool of suck).

At last, on August 3, one day before our kitchen-warming party, the 50-year-old unit was taken out and replaced, destroying the ceiling in the process. Obviously, the air conditioner replacement people were not about to fix that.

Here are the incredibly stupid "access panels" before the destruction. There was no way a normal-sized human could ever get up there to make repairs, much less remove the entire unit.

Ceiling: destroyed.

And that's pretty much the way it stayed until this week. Hideous, gaping hole, right in my living room. It got so that I didn't even see it anymore.

But then the nice men came and fixed it!

They set up a pretty awesome containment zone so that dust and asbestos didn't get all over the apartment, unlike the ceiling destroyers who left me with inches of carcinogenic dust on every possible surface.

Fixed! With a single access panel that swings down, allowing actual access to the unit.

Amazingly, this process took 2.5 days. Two-by-fours, drywall, spackle, popcorn of two varieties, paint, and god only knows what else transformed the hole into this nice smooth surface. You can still see where the hole was. It was never going to be perfect, but it's perfect enough.

And with that, my living room is finally, finally done.