Category: Personal Updates

Alright, time to give an update about what’s been going on since my last personal update. Just so yall know that things are alright now.

So, basically, my dad almost set fire to our house on Tuesday (by accident, obviously) because he got mad about the amount of woodsmoke in our house.

You see, we own a woodstove at my house and usually use it to save on heating bills and in case we lose power. It’s in our living room, the largest room in our house and it’s openly connected to the rest of our ground floor. We’ve taken good care of it, so it’s lasted us a good 20 years (when most only last about 10 before they need to be fixed/replaced).

But yesterday, we were having trouble with smoke blowing back into the house instead of going out the chimney. So we decided to try and wait for the wood to go out and call the local chimney company to take a look at it. (Turns out we had a creosote build-up in there.)

Problem was, the fire just wasn’t going out, no matter how much we cut the airflow.

Finally, my dad got pissed at how much smoke was getting into the house and divided to throw the still-slightly-burning logs outside before they could set off the fire alarms and deafen us all. As a dude from Arizona, where usually the only thing outside was dirt/sand, that made perfect sense.

Here’s the thing though we live in New England and it is currently spring. Most of the snow outside has melted, despite it still being arse-freezing cold out. It’s a period of time where fire danger is actually really high.

Why? Because the ground is currently covered with dead, dry leaves from last fall. Dry leaves catch easily, making them great for kindling. And our lawn was covered in them. Like a wall-to-wall carpet.

It’s not hard to figure out what happened next.

The glowing hot logs catch the lawn on fire (much too close to the house btw) and my parents freak out and race around to grab water to put the flames out. They don’t explain it to me, so I had no idea what all the running around I heard above me is about. (My personal work area is tucked away in our basement.)

I know nothing until my dad jogs down the steps to grab something and I hear my dad scrambling around muttering frantically about fire and my first thought is “Oh God, Dad set the living room on fire.”

I leap to my feet, grab the fire extinguisher we keep down with me (in case of an electrical fire), and chase after him. Which is when I find out the fire is OUTSIDE the house and not, like, in our carpets or books or something.

I start blasting the extinguisher (which turns out to be way more effective than the water btw) and go through two of them before the glow/burn is fully out. And I just kept going until there was nothing left in that thing.

(Those flames were starting to get under our deck. Which is made of wood and attached to the actual house. So I was especially focused on that.)

Dad raked up all the leaves left away from the house and sprayed the grass down to make sure it was too wet to catch again.

After that, Dad finally calls the local guys to come out now instead of the guys he’d called before all that who hadn’t called him back yet.

The Chimney problem was fixed yesterday, and the guy who came out cleaned it out really thoroughly.

He also advised Dad that we needed to get a new woodstove ASAP. It’ll last us through the season but according to the Chimney Sweep, if we don’t replace it before next winter, it’ll probably fail on us and risk a serious fire.

So now we’re looking for a new one which is gonna be a financial gut punch, but better than the monthly bill we’d get for heating oil.

So we’re okay, the house is safe, but all of that was very stressful at the moment.