Post #805926 by mike and marie on Sun, Oct 9, 2022 5:22 PM

We're interested in hearing people's thoughts and ideas about builds in areas that have a lot of exposed ductwork.

One thing we've done in the past is paint them. Painting tapa-like patterns is a go, as well as painting in a color that will blend into the area or make it less obtrusive, such as black or dark brown.

But we're looking for more ideas. We have an area with a lot of exposed HVAC ducts, basically two stretches in parallel, both the supply and the return lines. They are currently painted white.

Now we've got an idea that's beyond paint. We want to repaint them, first, with a smeared up blend of browns and blues and greens to them give that underwater beam look. But then also, we thought wouldn't it be great if they could be draped in fishnet? Especially of various colors? And then, the space between the ducts and all the fishnet would be the perfect place to fit all kinds of things from shells and starfish to postcards and even small Treasurecraft ashtrays and whatnot. We could even create fake barnacle colonies and affix them with magnets.

This would be totally fine most of the year when the furnace isn't in service, or when the air conditioning is on, but of course in winter when the heat is going it's probably not a good idea to have the blazing hot metal ducts draped with fish netting. Right? We briefly considered plastic fishnet (like the garden mesh bird netting stuff you can get), especially because like regular fishnet it's available in multiple colors like black, brown, turquoise, green and orange -- but again, probably not a good idea to have a thermoplastic permanently fixed to the heating ducts.

So the best we've come up with so far is to use thin wire chicken mesh, like this stuff:

Not too thrilled about this, for one thing it won't have the colors that real fishnet or the plastic stuff will have, painting it seems to be troublesome and might not be very successful, so we're not convinced it's the way forward.