Wedding Rings and Heating Vents

There are some mornings when my child comes sprinting into my room and is ready for the day and neither I nor my husband are ready or willing to get out of bed. Sadly, on several occasions he has spent the better part of an hour climbing on us, laying down on our pillows pretending to be asleep for a few seconds, and then saying, "Oatmeal? Come on, let's go make 'em, the oatmeal!"

That was how it was going down one morning last week.

Then, Tom got up and hopped in the shower (I say hopped but I really mean stepped into). Braden continued trying to work on getting me to get out of bed but was making little progress. So he started doing something over by Tom's nightstand and then I heard a terrible sound. Clink! I looked up and there was Braden standing in front of the heating vent in our room.

"Uh oh, " he says.

"Braden, did you just put Dad's ring in the vent?"

"Ummm...yah."

Oh dear.

"Let's go get 'em, the ring, " he suggests.

Seeing how there is only one tiny little opening in the vent that is even big enough for a ring to fit through, I was curious to see how Braden thought we should proceed.

"Come out ring, come out!"

"Ring! Come out!"

Yes, it would have been grand if that little wedding ring had just climbed on out of the heating vent of its own volition.

I informed the owner of the ring of the situation. He got out The Tools. He dismantled the heating vent and invented a little something we are just a little bit proud of (patent pending).


It is primarily used for figuring out how deep your heating duct is. You attach a pair of nail clippers to the longest rope you have and drop it down the heating duct until you hear it make contact with the bottom. Clink! Yes, there's that sound again. Then you know how deep your heating duct is.

Okay, after it was determined that the ring was many many feet down the heating duct, we patched things up and decided to take The Demolition Show down to the basement.



Once we arrived, Tom got to work dismantling the Mother of All Heating Ducts. I'm kind of uneducated about how heating ducts and heating vents and gas leaks are connected, but the whole time I kept envisioning us all waking up dead because we had caused a carbon monoxide leak or something in our own house...all for a ring. Let's just say I have a very vivid and active imagination.


And still no ring.

Then, we noticed that the other heating duct might be the one located under the room where the ring was dropped, so we decided to check that out. There was even a little hole already made in the duct...what luck.

And just inside that little hole - was a wedding ring. It turns out that none of The Tools or The Demolition Show was actually necessary.

And here is that wedding ring, back where it belongs.