911, What are you reporting?

Not exactly the ‘welcome to the neighborhood’ I was hoping for.  We turned our gas fireplace on for the first time yesterday. Within 20 minutes or so there was a REALLY strong smell of wood burning. Not a good feeling in a new house.  It’s gas, and it has fake logs, so logically one would think that something else was burning besides that.  We sniffed the outlets, felt around the walls for hot spots, sniffed in the basement, upstairs, etc to no avail. Finally we decided to give up and call the fire department. That’s what they are there for right?  And I was hoping they had one of those nifty thermal imaging cameras like we had in Palm Springs to see heat in the walls. They did! Except they call it “Fire Spy” here. Oooo.  I was mortified to have a full response toned out, but better safe than sorry.

{For those of you in CA, when the fire department gets a call here, they have these air-raid sounding sirens that go off at the station that can be heard for miles. I am not kidding. They are staffed with lots of volunteers so that siren is in addition to their pagers.  I feel like we are in the Blitzkrieg sometimes it goes off so often!} 

Anyway, you can gauge their response time by counting from when you hear that siren go off to when they show up at your door! So after dutifully telling the dispatcher we would wait outside the house, I was bad, and ran around putting down painters tarps and cardboard on our wood floors and very light colored carpet.  Can you guess why?

So after finding nothing in the walls, and saying that it smelled more like paint than smoke (not helpful) they concluded that it was just the fireplace getting ‘broken in’, and burning of dust and particles inside. Ok…. So we left the fireplace running and opened all the windows and doors (it was fairly cold out), and of course after they leave the smoke detector started going off every five minutes and we had to keep fanning it.  Hubby came up with the brilliant plan of placing a box fan on two chairs pointing up at the alarm, and that quieted the nerve-shattering noise.  I am sure all the neighbors are wondering what is wrong with those ‘new people’.  They all seem to be quite friendly.  Walking around the neighborhood in the evening is very popular here, and everyone likes to stop and say hi and introduce themselves if they see us in the yard or garage.  On the plus side, our grass is coming in!  Hubby says yesterday… “ I hope it rains tomorrow – it’s free water.”  I started laughing hysterically and asked if he ever imaged that sentence would come out of his mouth.