You Know How . . .

People like to theorize what they would save if their house was on fire? Well, I can now say that I officially know and the answer is my kids and that's it. Oh yes, you read that right, we had a house fire this week, but don't panic, it was mild. We were watching a movie late at night when Larry smelled smoke. We both jumped up and as we were running upstairs, all the fire alarms in the house started going off. It was terrifying. We grabbed both of our kids and ran outside. Then Larry went back in with a fire extinguisher in hand to turn off our heat and check things out, because although we could smell fire and the alarms were going off, there was no smoke and no visible fire.

A few minutes after he turned off the heat, the smelled cleared up and the alarms went off. Strange. We weren't sure what to do. Just go about our normal lives? After consulting with my dad, we decided to call the fire department and they said they would send someone to check it out, which left the four of us freezing on the porch at midnight when a firetruck pulled up and five firefighters went in to explore the house.

They thought Creed must have stuck a crayon or something in one of the vents and it melted and burned, but they took our vents apart and found nothing (that would have been very unlike Creed). They found a hole in our duct work and said the ducts were extremely hot. When they had us turn the heater back on, the smell started again and the alarms went off so they advised us to keep it off and ask our landlord to send someone to check out the furnace the next day.

It turns out that our furnace was set for sea level and never adjusted for our elevation so it was burning way too much gas and it was way too hot and indeed was setting our house on fire (we don't know whether it was lint in the vents or wood the hot vents were against or what). Scary!

I feel incredibly blessed that things worked out the way they did.

A few of you back up your hard drives after hearing about us losing ours and I was happy to hear some good came of it so I hope I can say the same thing about this experience. Please make sure that you have working smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors (ours really may have saved our lives) and a working fire extinguisher (they have expiration dates) and if you live at a high elevation, please be sure that your furnace was adjusted (it should have a neon green sticker somewhere on it if it has been adjusted).

In the meantime, our house continues to look like this

And like this

I can't wait for our move to be over in two weeks!