jeff 2.0

Window Air Conditioner through a Brick Wall Project

Wife says, "Lets put an air conditioner in the garage window for the garage cats."

I say, "OK, but the window is in the front and an AC unit would look pretty bad there."

So, I get the great idea to put it through a hole in the back of the brick garage wall.

This is the saga of why that's a hard thing to do.

First step was to cut the sheetrock in the proposed location to check for obstructions.

And.... we found several items that made us move over from where we wanted to be.

The next trick was to cut a hole in the bricks. The proposed location had to be moved, causing the unit to overlap the electrical service to one of the main HVAC house units. This had to be removed and relocated..

I used a hammer drill and made a million 3/8" holes along the perimeter of the intended cutout. Then I waggled the drill bit side to side, to wallow out the space between the holes.

So far so good. The brick plug came out exposing some kind of fabric behind it.

Here's where the problems challenge started.

The window unit was designed to fit in a (you guessed it) window. Windows are way narrower that the thickness of a brick wall, fabric, air space, 2x4 stud and sheetrock width. I forgot that the unit has to hang out the back and tilt down, to release condensation.

Oh, and I had to reframe the 2x4's that were in front of the hole that had to be moved.