For Christmas last year the kids gave my husband and I a trip to the Caribbean.
- This year we are celebrating our 35th wedding anniversary so it was nice to have a way to get away.
We booked our trip for the middle of February so we can escape the ice and cold for two weeks. We flew to Miami where we were to meet our ship and when we left the house everything was fine. We had arranged to have the mail stopped and one of our neighbors was going to keep an eye out for anything they saw that might be a problem. The problem was, what was going on inside the house was not visible from the outside. Apparently while we were gone the furnace had broken and no one had any way of knowing. I’m not sure how long it had been off, but, all I know is that we came home to a basement filled with about an inch of ice and broken pipes throughout. The temperature is while we were gone were in the twenties so over time the house got too cold causing the pipes to break and flood part of the basement and the kitchen area. This damage was evident from the moment that we walked in and my husband called the HVAC company while I made reservations at a local hotel. The trip was great but I was looking forward to sleeping in my own bed and now that wasn’t going to happen for several days. The HVAC people were great and showed up within an hour to repair the furnace but as it started to warm the house we had a lot of cleaning to do. The neighbor came over to help and apologized for not knowing that something was wrong but we assured him that there was no way he could have. There hasn’t been a power outage or anything so he never would have suspected there was a problem with the furnace.