Kitchen Nightmare

As most of my friends know I, being the fantastic cook that I am, caught our kitchen on fire a while back (right around the time Nolan was 6 weeks old). I really can cook but this particular instance is not one I would put on a list of successes in the kitchen. Anyways, we all got out okay and the damage was recoverable for the most part...

just a MAJOR HEADACHE!

The Play by Play

We had just sat down to our TV trays in the living room with Nolan in between us in his boppy lounger when I look up into the dining room (right outside the kitchen) to see smoke...lots of really black smoke! Will and I both jumped up and ran into he kitchen to grab what we thought would be a pot of scorching beans but was instead a full fledged grease fire. I had fried chicken (healthy I know, sometime you've got to indulge-just don't catch your house on fire when you do-BUSTED!) in an iron skillet and didn't remove it from the eye when I finished (note: those continue to heat after turning off the stove) and after that we're not sure what happened - besides the fact that something caught fire, that we were sure of. We grabbed a dish towel and tried to smother it but that just made it worse so I hit the fire button on the alarm, grabbed Nolan and ran to my neighbors (who incidentally hadn't had the flu shot so she hadn't yet been able to hold him -needless to say she was thrilled) in the pouring down/freezing rain and tossed him at her and said dial 911 my house is on fire. I ran back to the house and to my surprise both pets had run out so I chucked them both in my car so they wouldn't get in the way of the 4 fire trucks that came barreling down the road. 

All the while, my husband who I had yelled at MULTIPLE times to GET OUT stayed in the house battling fire with anything he could think of, sweet tea being one of those things. All I could think as black smoke was billowing out of thehouse was, 1-Will is going to come out covered in burns, if he comes out and  2-I hope it doesn't mess up the nursery!

Skipping Forward to our Clean Up Efforts
In the midst of the clean up I must admit I had quite a few nervous breakdowns, all of our stuff was packed away to be cleaned (yes ALL of it) and some was returned damage to my dismay. Everything in my house had been removed and invaded (due to every square in being covered in soot) and it was quite a miserable experience. In retrospect, its all DONE FINALLY, with the exception of the 4 boxes in the garage I haven't yet made time for.

Here are some photos of the Bad, the Ugly, then the GOOD.

 

The Culprit



The Mess

We did take the opportunity to upgrade, which is nice considering our kitchen hadn't been updated since it's original installation in 1993.

Sorry for the blurry cell pic

Hardware has been added since this photo, I just don't have a picture.