Snuggle Up

Let me tell you a story. A story about how one little part (see picture below) can completely alter life as we know it.

This is a (disassembled) fan and motor that mounts to the outside of our house and makes a draft for the heating system. Motor seized. No draft. No heat.

Saturday during the day, every time the fan would kick on, the house would vibrate and the motor made an awful sound. We knew it was definitely on its last leg, but we were hoping it would hold out until the weekend was over so we would not have to pay weekend prices for HVAC repair. No such luck. Sometime between going to bed Saturday night and waking up Sunday morning, mechanical failure ensued. We woke up to a chilly house on Sunday morning. Not TOO cold - it was 66, which I know is warmer than many people keep their house anyway - but it was noticeably colder than our 'normal' which is usually around 72.

So, I began making phone calls. I looked in the yellow pages and called several companies in the area who said they did emergency 24 hour service.

Skip A LOT of crazy details. It was Monday at 12:30 before anyone ever came, and it was 2:40 before the furnace finally kicked on again. That equals approximately 36 hours with no heat. And no hot water. Uggh.

Sunday night, this was the scene in our house...
We all camped by the fire in the living room. We put the kids on the pull-out bed, and Lucas and I slept on the floor between the couch and the fire place. We had a space heater on the other side of the couch, so it made sort of a little heat bubble (if heat is really the appropriate word... it was more like a 'not-as-painfully-cold-as-the-rest-of-the-house bubble'). We loaded everyone up with tons of blankets, and in Meagan's case a winter hat, and we snuggled in. Even after going through every fire log in the house through the course of the night, it was 55 degrees in our house when we woke up Monday morning. I think my kids have never been so happy to go to school in all their lives. We even left 5 minutes early just so we could sit in the van with the heater running. Pretty sad.

At any rate... the part is fixed. The heat is on. Hot water has returned. And our furnace has never run quieter (or less). It just seems to be running more efficiently than it ever has since we've been here. So that's a definite plus from the whole thing. Plus we decided we could definitely stand to lower the normal temp in our house, so we dropped it down to 70 in the day and a little cooler still at night. All is good again.

It was an adventure. Don't want to do it again any time soon. Thankful for the ridiculous number of blessings we have in our life, and determined to not take them for granted.



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