Miracle Fire

We woke up yesterday morning to 6 inches of snow. Bret was out at 7am blowing snow for many of the senior members of our ward. We got home from church at noon and Bret and Tyler were out the door again . . . shoveling just a few more homes. Jenny and I decided to start a fire to warm us up. It was a perfect day for a fire.

Later in the day, Tyler noticed that our kitchen smelled like some sweet frosting. He kept asking me what kind of secret treat I was making, but unfortunately there wasn't anything up my sleeve. We didn't know where the sweet smell was coming from.

Bret and I ran up to Matt's house to help him with some things. We were gone for close to 45 minutes. When we got back the smell was even stronger but kind of different. We did a little family night and that's when the smell started bugging me. It was boarder line electrical fire smell but still sweet. We started smelling around the kitchen and thought maybe it was coming from one of the outlets in the wall. Bret pulled the plate off to check the plug but nothing looked suspicious. While we all stood around and watched, Shawn leaned up against the wall and then pulled away saying, "Ooh, That wall is hot!"

That's when we noticed that the wall on the back side of the fireplace was really warm. Bret put the fire out and sprayed cold water along the back of the fireplace wall. Once that was cooled, he grabbed a couple bags of frozen peas and pressed them against the wall in the kitchen. By this time the house smelled like smoke and the air was a little smokey too. Bret noticed that the paint on the wall was starting to bubble and was coming off the wall in pieces. He pulled about a 2 foot by 3 foot chunk of messed up paint off the wall. The paint had a sweet smell to it . . . the sheetrock underneath smelled like an ashtray. It was so bad!

After awhile of pressing the cool bags on the wall, it cooled down quite a bit, but the smoke smell still seemed to get worse throughout the evening. We went to bed with a really stinky house and a 2X3 foot space of paint pulled off the wall. We were frustrated . . . we weren't sure what to think.

I slept awful that night. The smell was so bad. The whole house smelled like a huge ashtray.

I woke up the next morning to a huge surprise . . . scary surprise. The smell was so bad. I decided to cover up the exposed sheetrock with a plastic bag or something. When I went in to work on it, I saw that we had a basketball sized burn hole in the wall. The sheetrock was black, the baseboard was completely gone and part of the floorboard was gone too. I went in to wake up Bret and told him the wall had burned and the baseboard was gone. He tells me now that he thought I was crazy. He thought I was still asleep and loosing my mind. Unfortunately this time, I wasn't.

Throughout the day we have thought about how blessed we are that our house didn't burn. . . When we went to help Matt and left the kids home with the fire, when we were all asleep in the night . . . We are so grateful to have our warm home standing in one piece today. It's an absolute miracle that a blazing fire didn't start in that wall. We are so grateful that our family was protected last night. It was a Miracle. . .