Roughing it

I think enough of you have heard that we live in a house built by my grandparents and inherited by my parents. It's conveniently next door to my parents and while I was younger a great escape from my house and now heading the opposite way to my parents house is a great treat for my girls.

It's been great living here but for the past four years of being here I have always slept with one ear alert for the crapping out of our furnace. It's the original heating system down there in the basement and we've had our shares of repairs to it in the past few winters. Always minor ones that kept it going but not so much of an investment not to do it. Then on Wednesday night I was downstairs doing laundry and I saw a puddle on the floor beneath it. At first I thought it was oil since we have an oil fired system. So I dragged Gary down in the 3rd period of the Bruins playoff game to look at the oil spill. It was only when he was down there with me that I realized it wasn't smelly like oil and I looked closer and realized there was water pooling on the floor near the furnace. Strange for sure because it's not how I thought it would go.

So at 9:30PM on a Wednesday night a week before my father has major surgery I didn't know who to tell or call, etc. It ended up that my cousin who is a plumber came over, isolated the problem area to stop the leak and we resigned ourselves to the fact that a new furnace was needed and cold showers were to follow until a plan was in place.

Since I grew up in a household of "do it yourselfers" and my husband would rather pay someone to do things he doesn't know how to do, there is always a differing of opinions on how to approach things. Luckily he handed over the reigns on this one and let my family handle it. So my brother called in a few favors from friends and we were delivered a beautiful new furnace yesterday and it was installed by aforementioned plumber cousin. And of course on this humid May day we had to test the furnace to make sure it was working by turning on the heat. So we are now with every window open and fan available to try to take it under 80 degrees in here.

Surprisingly with this little mishap I realized that in the summer months I could probably go without a furnace if the sole purpose was to take showers. I could even save a significant amount of money doing it. I simply microwaved some bowls of water and put them into a large pan on the stove. Heated it up to lukewarm and headed to the shower. I used the cold water to wet down my hair and soap up the necessary areas and then took the cold water as long as I could. I then turned off the cold water and used the girls' watering container that we rinse them with to get all the soap off. Granted this wasn't ideal but I was very impressed that we were able to get the job done with showering here and not having to do much out of house showering. Sure I went Thursday to the gym and Gary had had enough this morning and showered at the gym as well. But I am pretty impressed at how we were "roughing it" the past few days. Now I have to turn on my dishwasher because as luck would have it, we ran it on Wednesday morning before the furnace bit it and we were able to stretch it a bit with the dishes the past few days.

Oh, and I also need to bathe my kids.....I suppose I shouldn't give myself too much credit for this after all since they have been sponge bathed for the past three days. Unless you count Nicole's swim lesson this morning where she got a hosing down after the pool and Aimee got her hair cut today so at least her hair is clean from the salon. I guess I am not as rough as I would like to think!