You may want to avert your eyes....

I installed our new stove hood last night. The box said "Easy Installation."

"Easy Installation" my ass. Maybe if one has a team of midgets it would be easy. I, however, found myself contorting about on top of our stove, holding the stove hood up with my head, shoulders & screws that I just jammed in to help keep the thing up.

The hood didn't fit in the space that the old one came out of, either, which means the helpful guy at Lowe's lied to me ("Yes Ma'am, they're a standard size."). Either that, or (more probably), the person who put our kitchen cabinets in didn't use standard measurements...for the top cabinets (the stove fit perfectly, so my guess is the upper cabinets are about 1/4" closer together than the bottom cabinets). So I had to get out Mr. Dremel. I took care of the "not fitting" problem, yessir-re-bob. Have Dremel, will travel. There was someone looking out for me, though, because the hood fits snugly against the dremel'ed side, leaving the nice, factory straight edge as the one that's more apparent. I'm not sure how that happened....

I begin to put the hood in, now that it'll fit, and I realize that the hood is for flat-bottomed cabinets...which ours aren't. So the screws that came with the hood are too short to bridge the gap between the edge of the cabinet & the actual bottom of the cabinet. So, with the hood being held in place with four screws jammed in the back, and a vacuum hose to prop it up, I run to the tool closet to try to find some longer screws....and come up with - ta da! - deck screws!!! They're long enough, right? No one will see them, so it should work, right?

So I take the deck screws, and the left one goes in fine...the right one has about 1" before it's flush, and it won't go in any further. I try EVERYTHING, but nothing. So there I am, with a stove hood that's leaning down about 1" on the right. Not good. Then I notice that if I pull the hood forward about 1", I can use the screws that came with the hood & put into the wooden edge of the cabinet. Perfect! So I unscrew the deck screws, and try to pull the hood forward...and can't because of the 4 screws I jammed in the back to try to help hold the thing up. So here we go again...I undo the four screws in the back, and once again am wishing for a team of midgets to help me hold this thing up (I tried the cats...they just weren't good workers. Walked off the job site.). The hood is resting (again) on my head & shoulders...as I'm trying to delicately balance a screw on the end of my cordless screwdriver so I can line this hood up & screw it in before the screw falls off the end of the driver....I get the right one in. Now...how to turn around, on the stove--still with the hood resting on my head (by the way...aluminum filters tend to snag the heck out of your hair. Just keep that in mind.). I do it, and get the left one in (again, with the delicate balancing of screw atop driver...). But the back holes are still in limbo--still a good couple of inches from any solid wood. So I grab the trusty deck screws, and go to it. Again, the left one goes in fine, but the right one...not so much. If you pull down on the rear right of the hood, it'll come down about an inch. But don't you dare pull on it while I'm around. If you leave it alone, and don't touch it much (turning the light & fan don't seem to make it wiggle...which is good), you'd never know. Unless you duck your head down & look.

The hood fell on me, on the stove, and just about fell out the window (okay, that wasn't so much a fall as it would have been a thrown.). I was dirty, sawdusty, sweaty & swearing (sorry, Mom, but I was).

It's done, and it looks real purty. Just don't look too close. There's a deck screw holding up the back of hood.