This weekend I did not die

In which your humble narrator describes the horrors of code compliance and the likelihood that it will kill you in your sleep.

I almost never die on the weekend, and this past one was no exception, but it I did come closer to death than usual.

Regular readers (hi to all three of you!) will remember my water heater woes from a few weeks back in which we learned that we needed to have an expensive metal liner shoved down our chimney for many hundreds of dollars, so that we would not die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Last Thursday, after most of the coldest, wettest October in Minnesota that I can remember had passed, the chimney guy (I'll call him "Ron" because that's his name) came with his chimney helper (I refrained from referring to him as the "elf.") to put in the new liner. They worked for about three hours, finished up and went away. Hooray!

Then it warmed up, which was nice. So the furnace didn't really run Friday or Saturday. Then it got cold again, and since we don't like freezing it started kicking on Sunday. Everybody was sort of crabby and disagreeable all day. I had a headache that wouldn't go away, even though it never threatened to blossom into migraine-awfulness. It was just sort of a crappy day all the way around.

Then on Monday I woke up with a headache again. I went down to the basement to start one of 37 loads of laundry that needs to be done weekly and noticed that the basement was humid, smelly and was making me feel woozy. Also, the furnace was overheating and blowing stinky air out of the intake vent. Then I went outside and noticed that there was no smoke coming from the chimney. Then I turned the furnace off and opened a lot of windows and called Ron. Ron was there within a half an hour, and seemed more freaked out than I was. I sort of assume basic human decency coupled with visions of lawsuits danced in his head. I figured that since we hadn't already expired that we were probably all good at this point.

Anyway, he fixed it within about 3 hours. (Which is when my headache went away too!) Apparently a piece of the new liner came loose and blocked the furnace exhaust entrance to the flue, causing the furnace to backdraft into the house.

I'd just like to point out that the old, non-code-compliant, ostensibly dangerous chimney liner never tried to kill us all in our sleep.