The Great Winter of 2014

Holy buckets! That was a doozy! We just experienced what I will forever refer to as The Great Winter of 2014. The weather duded predicted that we were going to have some of the coldest temperatures in the past decade. (I also heard that it was the coldest in 30 years, but I don't know what was right.) When I heard that forecast, I thought to myself, "Huh. I sure hope our heater doesn't break down. Cuz...ya know...that would suck." You see, our heater has been making some pretty awful sounds for the last couple of months and I was beginning to get concerned of its ultimate demise. Turns out that my fears were justified. Last Thursday, our heater went kaput. We woke up in the morning to an untoasty 65 degrees in the house. I was not happy.

Josh, having a Journeyman's license in HVAC (heating and air), but zero tools for the trade, was able to diagnose the problem. However, he could not fix it. Night one without heat was chilly. Night two got worse. Then the "winter vortex" that swept the country hit us. We had a new heating and air unit scheduled to be installed for Saturday before all of the bad stuff was supposed to hit us. It got backordered and we couldn't get it installed until Monday. Great.

We ended up with five space heaters and desperately tried to bump the temp of the house up high enough that it wouldn't fall into arctic conditions overnight. When the temps started to drop, it got rough. The core of the house got colder upon each passing hour and my toes were little frozen sausages nonstop. Geez, my core was getting colder too. Sunday night (the worst of the weather) hit us pretty hard. The heaters couldn't keep up and our tiny 954 sqft house was rejecting having so many amps being pulled. Breakers were tripping right and left (scary) and I had to go around unplugging everything nonessential. We were sleeping with the lights on in hopes that the light bulbs would give off some extra heat. I'm happy to say that the temp on the thermostat never got below 63 degrees. Now, please keep in mind that the thermostat was five feet up on an inner wall. The temp in our room was in the 50's and the floor temp was barely that. Guess it's true. Heat rises.

We woke up Monday to another surprise. Even though we left the faucet in the kitchen trickling, our hot water pipe in there froze. Yay for us. I tried to heat it up with a heater all day to no avail. Josh, that lucky guy, got to take a short trek under the house crawl space with my hair dryer to unfreeze the line and hope that he wouldn't find a break in the pipe from expansion. He was successful and we had water within ten minutes of Mr. Hairdryer's handiness. Luckily, there was no break either. Phew!

I'm happy to say now, that the new heater is installed and pumping out heat for our personal enjoyment. I was very close to getting a sleeping bag out and sleeping on one of the vents just like I did when I was a kid and my mom and dad yelled at us for "covering the vents." I still feel like I'm cold at the core from all that chilliness. But boy howdy! I am sure glad those days are behind us. The kids were cold. I was cold. Heck! Even the cats were cold! They went into some rare kitty hibernation state. There were five curled up fluff balls around our house that never moved except twice a day at meal times. It was one heck of a five day stretch without heat. I would have loved to have had a fireplace right about then. How people lived without central heat back in the day, is beyond me. Thank God for central heat.

Evie was helping daddy unfreeze the pipes.