Tuesday, May 18, 2010

They caught my house on fire. But fixed the pipes.

NOPE. I'm not kidding.
The maintenance guys literally lit part of my kitchen on fire!

The beginning... moving things around and opening the wall above the cabinets.

So first... they moved the fridge out and then the washer/dryer. After that they ripped open the area above the washer/dryer to get to the pipes and the space above the cabinets, the vent for dryer lint also runs along the pipe-line, so they cut it open to pull it out of the way. Evidently the hot water pipe was the one leaking, so they ran the upstairs and downstairs hot water in order to drain the pipes then turned the water off. This is where things got interesting, he used a saw to get the old pipe out, besides the insane noise (banging, clanging, sawing) nothing bad. But then when he grabbed the new piece of pipe and the blowtorch to solder... well... he lit the lint vent on fire!

I didn't see it. All I heard was oh Sh......, Da....., Ahhhh!! Then, the guinea pigs started squeaking the loudest I've ever heard, as the smoke billowed from the kitchen (luckily towards the open window), and the maintenance guy bolted to his truck and grabbed the fire extinguisher.

The fire occurred up there...

Thankfully he put it out before it hit the kitchen cabinets or the drywall... just burned lint and some of the vent tube. He replaced the tube at the end of the day. Upstairs it stank all freakin' day long! (The air return is in the kitchen for the whole house unit). It was raining and 45* outside but I opened every window in the house, I couldn't handle the smell. (I'm so glad hubby is a non-smoking Marine, on of the few).

It was a pretty intense day.
Funny moment- he came out of the kitchen and asked if I had gotten the smoke detector to turn off. It never went off because of the open window venting the smoke out... what he heard was the guinea pigs!

(as for the A/C.... not that we need it at the moment thanks to this random cold & rain front we've got going on! They recharged the frion, said it was empty. We'll see if that's the case, if not they get to hear from me or hubs, AGAIN.)

6 comments:

  1. Dramaaaaa haha, sounds like an interesting day!

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  2. Wow, sounds like an interesting day! I'm so glad that nothing else caught fire!

    And I'm also marrying a few of the non-smoking Marines. I can't handle it because of my asthma.

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  3. WOWZERS!! That definitely sounds intense...glad to hear it was easily contained.

    Oh btw...thanks for the HK edible arrangement info. I was just showing those to my hubbt the other day :)

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  4. Yikes!!! Glad no really serious damage was done and no one was hurt!

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  5. one time i had a guinea pig named buck. he was about as big as my head but about 98% of it was just hair. haha.

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  6. That is crazy! Glad you and your house are ok!!

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