Fire! Fire! Fire

Our soot covered furnace filter.
The night we were able to move back into our house, Joey ran upstairs and said, "I want to jump on my bed." This is his celebratory bounce party.
Sleepy Kimball sitting still for the first time in his life :) at one of our host homes
The furnace that started the fire
Shattered glass all over the basement floor from the firemen breaking the windows

We are finally back in our home after being homeless for almost two weeks because of a house fire. We live in a duplex and on Tuesday the 19th a fire started in our neighbors side of the basement (which opens on the top to our side)

Tuesday afternoon I put the boys down for their naps, and then I laid down on the couch to read, and then I dozed off. About 20 minutes later I heard a pounding on the door and then my neighbor screaming, “Get out, the house is on fire!!!” I flew upstairs (still trying to comprehend that this was real) and grabbed the boys out of their beds. We ran outside in the freezing weather (wind chill of 17 below) and into the house of our neighbor Andrea Rhoten.. Brenna(our friend who lives on the other half of the duplex) then explained that she heard the fire alarm in the basement going off so she ran down to check. She then saw flames coming out of the furnace and ran to get all of us out.

Once the boys were safe and settled inside, I ran back to our house to grab my cell phone. I then opened up the basement door just to see, and a huge billow of black smoke came up. That’s when it hit me that this was for real.

In a matter of minutes there were 4 fire trucks in front of the house, and firemen running in and smashing out all the basement windows to let the smoke escape and to be able to get their hoses to the fire.

The firemen were able to put out the fire before too much damaged occured, but the Fire Chief said that if the fire had burned 10 minutes more, the entire house would have been in flames. Luckily for us, we only suffered smoke damage.

I think the worst part of the fire was all the thoughts of what could have happened. When I walked back into the boys rooms, it was so horrible to see the beds that they were sleeping in and think that I was 10 minutes away from loosing them. We definitely were very blessed and watched over that day.

We also received many blessings from friends and church members who offered their houses to us. We stayed in 4 different homes and were very grateful to have a warm, comfortable place to be. And Joseph was such a trooper. One night when we went back to the house to get Peter's car, Joey got really sad and kept saying, "I want to go in my house." But the rest of the time he was great. He thought we were on some fun vacation, and loved to play with all our friends' new toys.

We finally able to move back in this weekend (after a restoration crew cleaned the carpets, washed the walls, repainted a little, and removed the dirty, soot coated filter from the furnace. We are soooo happy to be back in our little home!