For Christmas, we went away for a full week. We took a tour of the Midwest by way of relatives, taking over my sister’s house in Bloomington, Indiana twice and my in-laws’ house in St. Louis for several days. When we finally walked into our own house after 7 days away, we were anxious to eat, sleep, unpack and just be at home.
Unfortunately, our house had other plans for us. When we opened the door, we were greeted with bitter cold.
It was 45 degrees in our house. (The picture says 47, but that was a little bit later.)
It was supposed to be 65 degrees.
It was 45 degrees.
You can see why this is a problem. My husband went down and tried to turn on the furnace several times, but nothing happened.
Our house was angry that we left it alone for several days, so it decided to break the furnace as retaliation. Luckily, it wasn’t TOO mean about the furnace. We needed one new part, which the repair guy popped in and out, and we were good to go. Sure, our dirty children who hadn’t been bathed in several days on the road had to wait another day because it was 59 degrees in our house when they went to bed (and that was downstairs, upstairs is usually 5 degrees cooler), but the repairs were minor and inexpensive (for a furnace. Still expensive to us!).
The next morning, my husband and I got up at the crack of dawn, left our sleeping kids with a baby-sitter, and went to a ridiculously early appointment. We told the baby-sitter to microwave breakfast for our big girls.
When we came home, we discovered our 9-year-old built-in above range microwave had broken in our absence.
So we went away for a week and the house not only broke the furnace while we were gone, it also broke the microwave.
I think the house is making its message loud and clear. We are never allowed to leave again.
At least we had an excuse to upgrade to stainless steel?
Of course, now I’m anxious for everything else to break OR us to get rich enough to replace the rest of the perfectly good ugly white appliances.
