My Kid Tried To Burn Down The House

Okay strictly speaking it was an accident, but still very unfun for most of us.

The situation is thus. We have a nice furnace in our home which blows plenty of nice warm air throughout. However, this being an older structure, the furnace ducting was not considered during the original construction. This means that we have one big vent in the floor of the main room on the upper floor, directly above the furnace.

So my son, who is just 4 got his hands on a brownie mix and dumped it down the furnace vent, presumably to see the flour fly up.

What happened was, of course it go into the furnace elements and heated up well beyond its intended temperature. Smoke issued forth. Alarms were raised.

My wife and I, being otherwise occupied at the time (or else we would have prevented the incident), had no idea what was going on. All we saw was huge amounts of smoke and blaring fire alarms. Needless to say we got everyone out and dialed 911.

Only then did we recognize the smell of brownies.

The fire dept. were gracious. There certainly was enough smoke to warrant concern. They kindly blew the smoke out and made sure that everything was okay. I’m just glad nobody was hurt.