I'm Gretchen Ruben and this is a little happier. This is a lesson that I learned when we were

renovating our dining room. Now, very uncharacteristically for me, I had seen a picture of some wall

paper in a magazine and had loved it so much that I actually ripped out the page and figured out

how to hunt down the wallpaper and use it in the dining room. This is completely unlike me and

so it was very, very exciting for me that we had this wallpaper. And my mother was visiting from

out of town from Kansas City when the wallpaper was put up and it looked great and it's very

expensive wallpaper and the contractor was saying to me, well, there's this issue with the wallpaper

because now you have this new vent, this air conditioning vent in your dining room. And we're afraid

that if we put a metal panel over the vent, the water might condense on it and drip onto your very,

very nice new wallpaper. And so I looked up at the wall and my mother was looking with me too and it

was this long, narrow, dark rectangle. And so we were talking about, okay, what are you going to do

about the vent? And now that I look back on it and I'm like, why doesn't this happen all the time?

But anyway, it seemed like a big concern and maybe we'd use wood for the vent because then the

water wouldn't condense and it just seemed every answer was more complicated than the last. And I was

getting very agitated about it. It was sort of taking all the fun out of this wallpaper because

now there was this really boring, difficult problem to solve. And my mother glancing thoughtfully

up at the wall and at this open part, she just says to us, what if you don't put a cover over the

vent? What if you just leave it open? And I thought, well, that's right. I mean, I looked up at it,

it was just this dark rectangle. It just vanished out of your eyes. It was extremely inconspicuous.

It was up near the top of the ceiling. So it didn't pop out at you. It didn't contrast very much

with the wallpaper. So we didn't really need to fix that problem. We just left it open and it's

been open to this day and I literally have never thought about it again to notice it except to think

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