The Story

On Friday last week, the boys and I played in their room in the morning. Bradley was practicing sitting on his potty, and I was encouraging and entertaining. Because he was not exactly fully dressed, we had the space heater in their room running. At lunch time, we left the room and I noticed that the house felt kind of chilly. I thought it was because I was so warm from the space heater or was getting a cold, so I ignored it and went on with the day.

Then Saturday rolled around. After my morning run, I sat down at the table to eat breakfast and again felt chilly. This is not unusual, I often feel chilly in the time between my run and showering, but this time it seemed exaggerated. I glanced at the thermostat on the wall near our table and noticed that our house was 61 degrees. I asked Brian if he had played with the schedule of our thermostat, but he had not. We had another problem. Our furnace was out. Brian called his dad and they tried to diagnose and fix the problem. Unfortunately, it was not what they were hoping. So, Brian pulled out his volt meter and tried to trace the electricity, but that proved to be more of a puzzle than anything.

Now that brings us to this picture.


The little heater hiding behind the chairs was our main source of heat for the weekend. We looked into calling a heating company, but weekends are considered emergency trips, making them more expensive. That little gas stove, with our space heater, sweaters, and blankets kept us warm-ish this weekend. We were just fortunate that it's March and not terribly cold. Our house hovered right around 60 degrees all weekend, which I found uncomfortably chilly.

The chairs in the picture? Well, that was Brian's solution for keeping the boys from getting too close to the heater and getting burnt. It wasn't pretty, but it worked.

So, there you have it. Brian's MacGyver tendency was to keep the boys away from the heater. Not because of too many toys going into it, but because it was working hard and very hot.