brrrrrrr

The weather is starting to get chilly around here this week. 

And wouldn't you know it, on Saturday morning our gas furnace decided to break.

Joy.

I woke up fairly early that morning, as I'm prone to do on days I'm allowed to sleep in (annoying), and went downstairs. I noticed it was slightly chillier than I normally schedule the thermostat, but I didn't think much of it. As I walked into the bathroom, I heard the furnace kick on...or try to.  This horrible rumbling sound shook the house, and instead of the heat blower turning on, the furnace shut down.  About a minute later it did it again. I yelled for Brad to come look, and we went down to the basement to try to figure out what was wrong. 

We stood in the basement staring blankly at the furnace, not sure what to do with a big metal box that burns natural gas. When it made the scary noise again we hit the 'off' switch, and ran away.

Neither of us wants our house blowing up, so we decided to call someone who actually knows what they're doing.

Before 8AM, I called what I thought was a local repairman.  Google told me the address of the company was located in town, not too far from my house.  So I called the number thinking they'd be better than dealing with a big heating company.  The lady on the phone took my information and said I should receive a call from a technician shortly.

We waited.  I put on my comfiest, warmest sweats, Ugg boots, and covered myself with a blanket. We waited some more.  Two hours later, I still had not heard from anyone, so I called again. I got a different lady that time, and she was not quite as friendly, and said she would page out my number again, but she didn't know when they'd be able to get back to me. Then I googled their phone number and found out they're actually located several cities away. Dumb. It's been four days, and I still have not received a call from anyone that works for that company.

I then called a bigger company in Washington. Their receptionist was horribly rude (please excuse me, ma'am, if this is the first house I've ever owned and first gas furnace I've ever had to maintain and I don't know what I'm doing!).  BUT someone was able to come out that afternoon and tell us what was wrong.

There's a motor or a fan or something that's broken, and the company would charge us a butt-load of money to fix it. But the technician said that you can get the part for half that price online, so he'd recommend doing that.  Great! Thanks, guy!  We also have a family friend who works for a commercial heating and cooling company who can install it for us.  Excellent.

We have to wait a few weeks until we have the money to order the part, and until then we're wearing lots of layers and staying in the TV room with a space heater. We also have a Cadet heater in our bedroom. So we don't have to freeze our buns off.

Sadly, it feels colder inside the house than it does when you go outside.

It's a good thing the cat has a permanent fur coat.