The House Fire

So in the middle of trying to make a business bloom, we also did major renovations to our home mostly by ourselves. Michael and my brother made concrete counter tops. We removed thousands of staples in the beautiful hardwood floors hidden under linoleum and carpets, put together kitchen cabinets by Ikea. A note on Ikea, you need to consider these cabinets, they have a 25 yr warranty, come in so many styles and the drawers are molded plastic so they are so easy to keep clean. We did our whole kitchen for $3,000 and anyone who sees the cabinets think they are custom. So anyway, we were nearly finished, had a great Thanksgiving and Christmas and on a freezing bitter cold Sunday night in February I turned in early. I had a bad cold and needed to be at Lincoln Center the following day to receive an award from Forbes Magazine for my companies achievements. I took some cold pills, put Little Miss Sunshine in the DVD played and fell asleep. At 1am my son Michael came into my bedroom and told me we needed to get out of the house that it was on fire.  I told him to go get Darina and the dog and I would go downstairs and check it out. As I made my way down the steps, thick black smoke overcame the house. Michael thought the fire was in the laundry room so I made my way over there, hit the light switch and heard sizzling. I immediately thought it was an electrical fire and screamed to the kids to leave everything and get out of the house. We stood out in the street in 10 below weather with only the clothes on our backs watching thick black smoke coming out of every crevice in the house. I called the fire dept. and our neighbors let us in as we watched 6 fire trucks and tons of fireman go in and out of our house for the next five hours. When it was all over we were told by the fire inspector that the fire was caused by spontaneous combustion. We were refinishing a piece of furniture in the basement and we left rags with stain on the concrete floor. The rags combusted in the middle of the night and spread to everything in the basement and made its way up the walls to the first floor of the house. The fire Marshall said we were lucky, if our dog Guinness didn't wake up Michael by barking non stop, we would have been overcome by smoke inhalation within minutes. Of course I was unconscious because I took a cold and flu medication and when Michael woke me up I told him he could take off from school and to go back to sleep!!! The kids and the dog saved my ass! When the smoke and flames subsided reality crept in. We sat in the driveway in the car with my insurance agent who told us to each get a garbage bag and take clothes for a day or 2. All our belongings would either go in the garbage or would be taken out to be cleaned. We gathered our garbage bags and headed to my office to figure out where we were going to live for a while! I'll continue later.....