We Have Heat!!!

This is a picture of me next to my gorgeous new furnace!! We have not had heat until yesterday - when we moved into our house in August, Ben kept bumping his head on the ventilation downstairs. So he tore down the ventilation, planning to re-route the heating through the attic. Well, we ran out of money, so we have had no gas heat in our house.

We have been kind of getting by on space heaters, but there have been several problems:
1) Space heaters are dangerous. I was always worried that my house would be burned down when I returned home from running errands.
2) The space heaters were overloading our electric circuitry, often tripping the breaker. Our breaker is on the outside of the house. So we'd have to put on boots and a coat and trudge out to flip the breaker back to where it should be.
3) Space heaters don't make your floor warm. Our floor was always freezing.
4) The space heaters were adding about $100 to our monthly electric bill.
5) We didn't have enough power to run space heaters in the basement, as well as the upstairs, so the basement was freezing. This froze our pipes a couple of times. For my Californian friends - if your pipes freeze hard, they will burst, and your basement will flood. I felt like my pipes were going to burst any minute. Our pipes didn't freeze hard, but they froze enough so that we didn't have running water in our bathroom sink. Our only bathroom.

My dad is lending us the money to pay for this, and we'll pay him back with our tax refund. I'm soooo relieved and grateful. So, right now, as I type this, I'm sitting in my balmy, warm, SAFE house. Ahhhh. Thank you, Dad!!