How do you keep cool, deal with dust and smell and prevent disaster DIY? Get a grip on the air.
The deal with dust and smell in home improvement is that it’s DIY disaster waiting to happen. You can’t NOT create it.
Dust, smell, and heat from demo, drywall sanding, tools, paint and working outside are inevitable. Drop cloths, sheet plastic, wimpy fans and tape are only so effective. Note: by ‘so effective’ I mean ‘not that effective.’
The real challenge is air. And one way to get a handle on preventing disaster DIY on projects is to control where the air is moving.
You can take a crack at it with the old fan-in-the-window trick—it kinda works. But only kinda. For doing DIY like a boss tooling up with an air mover puts power in your hands.
An air mover—yes, that thing drying floors at the grocery store or in wet basements—is a versatile disaster DIY minimizing machine. We stuck the Ridgid portable air mover in windows and on job sites and its three-speeds, rugged design, and super suction left our old box fan in the dust.
Love the color but hate the smell from your paint project? Suck it out the window before it floats through the house. Using a sander or miter saw inside? Blow the airborne dust out the door before it gets sucked into the HVAC.
One of my fave uses for an air mover is to help beat the heat working outside. I’ve tried setting up a fan on my workbench, but it blows dust in my face. An air-mover at my feet, however, blows a cool shaft of air without blowing a mountain of dust and works way better preventing the disaster DIY of me over-heating and melting down than I ever would have thought.
Move the air. Beat the heat. Soothe the smell and leave disaster DIY in the dust.
