At T-minus seven days until we arrive at the DC home, I've started thinking about some of the more involved projects I need to take care of in the first week or two of our lives there, and the one that I keep returning to is redoing the vent on our dryer. The house has an unfinished walk-up basement, and rather than do the work to vent the dryer through the exterior brick wall, the prior owner just installed flexible vent tubing and an indoor lint trap. This being suboptimal for about 1,000 reasons, I've decided to fix it, and plan to use 4" rigid aluminum to make the run from the dryer to the brick wall that sits at the back of the house. I'm pretty certain that, while more challenging that my average project, this is going to be easily doable; I estimate that the run from the dryer to the wall is about 20 feet and has acceptable bends in it (one 90-degree bend and two 45-degree ones), and I picked up a good, long masonry drill bit and a foot-long stone chisel to help me install the vent hood through the two-brick-wide wall. Most of the articles and tip lists that I've read on the 'net also stress using foil tape to seal all the duct joints and making sure to avoid flexible or semi-rigid tubing as much as possible, so I'll keep all that in mind, as well.

Anyone have any specific tips they want to share? Specifically, I'd love to hear people's experiences with making holes this big through a double-thick brick wall; it seems that that's the part of the job that might be the trickiest.