The furnace is working. Hooray! I asked on our town’s ‘community chat’ Facebook page if there was a company that worked Sundays, and sure enough, there was. In fact, the repair guy was a dad of some past preschoolers, so I’m super, super excited that he got to see my messy basement. (If you’re wondering what the problem was, Lloyd wrote it all out in a comment on yesterday’s post. In a nutshell, *hushed whisper* the Nest thermostat really is trying to kill us. It waited until a -7 degree night to turn off the heat. Help us. Please help us.)
Throughout the whole ordeal, I was in heat-managing heaven. It was like camping in our own house!! I got to use all my heat-producing/retaining devices: space heaters, candles, down blankets, wool sweaters, draft blockers. I even got to use the little kerosene heater! (With some unorthodox tinkering. I won’t share because it will scare my parents.)
If you ever lose heat, block off all the rooms you don’t need and heat the ones you’ll be in. (Watch your pipes, though. Don’t let them freeze.) We set up a couple of space heaters, slept in the living room and were fine. Lloyd said, “It’s just ‘upstairs cold’ down here.” We were able to keep the first floor around 60 degrees, but the upstairs was around 50, flirting with the 40s.
We didn’t go to church because I didn’t feel comfortable leaving the house with the little electric heaters running, so it was a quiet day. Just me, the cats and the unibomber.
After the nice repair guy left, Lloyd said, “I need to go see why there’s water in the basement.” What the what? Sure enough, there was a small puddle in the middle of the floor. We looked up and there was a duct that went… where does that go? Are we under the guest room? No, that goes up to… no. The upstairs bathroom??
You have got to be kidding me.
The pipes didn’t freeze, but maybe they got really cold and shrunk in their fittings? (They run through Lloyd’s closet and it is a pretty cold place.) Or maybe this has been going on for quite a while and we just discovered it. Either way, this will be fun to fix.