Burnt toast

I almost burnt my house down…the old one, not the new one.

On Saturday morning, we were expecting a woman to come see our house for the second time. She was supposed to arrive at 10am, so at 9:30 we turned on all the lights, set the A/C at 78 degrees, and loaded up the dogs to leave for a while. I also closed the appliance garage door (y’know, that cupboard that has a roll-up door that will hide your toaster and coffee maker) half way, making sure that you could see the toaster inside so the lady would know what the thing was for.

Then we left…for 5 ½ hours.

The lady never showed (we were supposed to get a call when they left so we knew we could go back home), so at 2:30 I told B that we HAD to go home because I was leaving the next day and I had a TON of things to do. He said to wait until 3pm (he was watching golf), but I insisted we leave right then.

Our plan was to go home, load up some stuff to take to a friend for a garage sale, then come back so I could pack and get some stuff done. While he was loading everything up, I ran inside just to see if the lady had shown up but no one had called us. As soon as I walked in the house I smelled something burning.

I walked all around the house, but I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I went outside to get Mom. As we walked back into the house I heard this weird buzzzing sound, and all of a sudden I yelled “The toaster!” We ran over to the appliance garage and tried to push up the door, but it wouldn’t budge. The door was hot, the tile was hot, and I was freaking out! I reached in and unplugged the toaster, but we still couldn’t get the door up.

Apparently when I pushed the door down before we left the house, the door pushed down the lever on the toaster, so for 5 ½ hours the toaster was on and it couldn’t shut off. The buzz I heard was the toaster trying to pop up. We decided to open the windows to air out the house and we left to let everything cool down.

We came back a couple hours later with my dad, and he climbed up on the counter, reached through the 4” opening and somehow unscrewed the melted track for the roll-up door from the frame. We pulled the door down and we found a MELTED TOASTER! The track was also demolished, and the inside of the cabinet was scorched, but other than that, there wasn’t any major damage.

God was watching over us that day! I think it would have only been a few more minutes before something actually went up in flames. If our countertop would have been formica instead of tile, it probably would have caught fire before we got home.