bat-chik replied to your post: Do you like milk and cookies or nah? Oreos or no?...
DUDE HOW DID YOU SLEEP THROUGH A FIRE???!?
srdtfygukgdhjghf ALRIGHT ALRIGHT OKAY STRAP IN FOR STORYTIME
The house I grew up in was built with a metal pipe chimney into the living room for a woodstove, but we never actually got a woodstove until I was like. Eight or nine years old-- we just had a weird ass metal pipe in the ceiling with foil over it to keep out the bats (spoiler alert: they flew in anyway sometimes and the cat went nuts).
So once my parents saved up some money and actually got and installed the woodstove, they wanted to burn it all the heckin’ time because hey, save on heating costs, it looks pretty, it’s warm and nice and wintertime so why the fuck not. But they didn’t know a whole lot about creosote buildup, and with how often they were burning the thing, it should’ve been at least checked pretty dang often.
Me being a tiny lil bab I was in bed and knocked tf out by about 8pm or so--lots to do in grade school the next day-- and my parents generally ate dinner pretty late because of my dad’s commute. He was gone every morning before I got up, and typically didn’t get home until after I was already in bed. So they’ve got the stove burning while they’re eating dinner out in the dining room, and they start to pick up on this dull sort of roar, which initially my mom thought was a plane overhead.
Surprise, it wasn’t a plane. Idk how much you know about chimney fires, but they literally sound like a freight train is running through your house.
(Here’s a link with a small example. Magnify that about a hundred times.)
So that gets going, my mom books it for the phone while my dad goes for the fire extinguisher which.....hey, it put out the fire in the stove, but did absolutely nothing for the fire in the pipe. My sister wakes up once the smoke alarms kick in, and my parents send her out on the porch away from the mild disaster. Fire department shows up--I’m still sound the fuck asleep in my room-- and my dad I think went and had one of the firefighters carry me out on the porch with my sister to wait with her and my mom while they put out the rest of the flames. Smoke alarms are still going off. Truck lights are flashing all over our driveway. Fire is still making the wooshy-wooshy sound til the flames go out. There’s at least five or six extra people running around and yelling to each other.
Fire’s out after maybe twenty minutes, my parents open all the upstairs windows because d a n g that smoke got far. My dad brings me back to my bed-- still asleep-- and sends my sister back to bed while they try and clean up.
I wake up the next morning and come downstairs completely oblivious like “why does the house smell gross? Also it’s cold, can we have a fire?”
(The next fire we had was also a chimney fire barely over a year later bc the sweep didn’t clean out the chute properly and that one almost burnt the house to the ground but h e y I was awake for that one at least)