Poster Child

Like I mentioned in my last post, we have been getting our house ready to sell. Well, yesterday was our inspection. I got a phone call from the realtor a little while later saying that the inspector found a problem with the furnace, turn off you heat (it was warm outside anyway) and he was calling a furnace guy to come over.

The furnace man arrived right as I was leaving to pick Gracie up at the bus stop, so I pointed him in the right direction. When I cam back, he was finished fixing the problem but said, "I cannot overstate how bad it was. Your house could be the poster child for carbon monoxide poisoning. This is the kind of stuff you read about in the papers."  I guess the flieu part that came detached from our furnace is very uncommon and rarely seen, but it was just letting the exhaust flow into the crawl space instead of directing it outside. We have no idea how long it has been like that. We could have been one of those tragic stories that you read about where the whole family dies in their sleep. I hate those stories.

We didn't even have a carbon monoxide detector. I would think about it at doctor appointments when they ask you if your detectors work. But, I never really got around to it. Sounds like a lame excuse.
I bought 2 yesterday. They said it helps that our house is older, not as tight as the newer houses. I think it also helped that our bedrooms are on the opposite side of the house? The truth is though,that we don't even know  how much an effect it had, or how bad it really was. We just know we will make better choices, like having detectors and getting the furnace serviced more often. Yikes.

So, in the last 24 hours we have all hugged each other a little tighter, thought about the terrible what ifs, and thanked Heavenly Father for protection from a danger we knew nothing about.