Early during our social distancing we had a couple of very unfortunate instances occur where our house nearly burned down TWICE in one week! The first was when Davis tried making himself some chicken nuggets for lunch using our basement microwave. Instead of cooking them for one minute and 30 seconds, he accidentally set the time for THIRTEEN MINUTES and 30 seconds!! The kids didn't notice until after the microwave beeped and then they noticed a smell. They checked the microwave, and the nuggets had caught on fire and smoke poured out of the microwave. Bode came running up to find me (I had been in the shower) and told me the chicken nuggets were black. I had no idea what he was talking about. Sean ran downstairs with Bode and saw what had happened. Unfortunately, the smell that came from the very overcooked chicken nuggets nearly destroyed our basement! It was the worst smell I have ever smelled. It wasn't just smoke or burned smell, it was a sickly sweet, rancid smell with smoke on top of it. It had seeped into our cabinets and carpet and I seriously thought we were going to have to move. After trying everything we could think of, we finally hired disaster cleanup people to come and they ran a special machine in our basement for several days to help remove the smell. We also had to have our carpets and couch deep cleaned and all of the surfaces and cabinetry wiped down with special cleaning solutions. All in all, those chicken nuggets probably cost more than $1,000 to clean up! Thankfully, after living with the smell for a few weeks, the machine and all of those other measures actually worked-- it was nothing short of a miracle. No scent remains, not even a trace and I am sooooooooo grateful! Poor Davis felt terrible, but it was obviously not his fault. I am actually proud of him for being independent and trying to make himself lunch!
Unfortunately, that wasn't our only house nearly being burned down experience. If you can believe it, about a week later, we had another one! I had made a giant chocolate chip cookie "pizookie" for our family in my cast iron skillet. I left the skillet on the stove that night before heading to bed. At about 2:30 am I woke up and thought I smelled smoke. I woke up Sean and he thought it was probably just the farm behind us burning something, but he got up to check anyway. Good thing he did, because he found the burner on the stove (of course it was the "power burner") had been turned on and the leftover pizookie was sitting over the flame at full strength and was burning! The only thing we can figure is Charlie woke up in the middle of the night looking for a snack and somehow crazily turned on the burner as he was trying to get to the cookie. You have to push down and twist the gas range knobs to light the burner, so it was some crazy coincidence he was able to do it with his paws. Sean and I were so on edge from our experience with the basement we leapt into action. At 2:30 in the morning we opened every window and door wide open in our house and it was freezing outside! In the back of my mind I knew people burned cookies all the time without permanent smoke damage, but I couldn't get over the fact that we finally were getting our basement back in shape, but now the main and upper floors smelled like smoke and there wasn't anywhere else to go in the house to escape it! Being in the middle of a quarantine/pandemic where you spend most of your time inside your house was not the best time for both of these events! Especially since it was still cold outside here! I am really glad I can laugh about it now and that our house has recovered and smells good again!
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