Fire

Well all things come in threes don't they? It seems to be the way things lay out, I guess. Well in January we found out that my husbands grandfather had bone and lung cancer and that seemed to hit the family hard we had all the family here to try and be with him and help him out. Then about a week and a half after we found that out we get a call from my in-laws and were fold my mother in law had done something to her back and was in serious condition and could barely move and was in massive pain. So here are two things, that happened so you think we would get the hint at look out somethings going to happen one more thing has to happen. Well then you go on my side of the family, my parents home has been for sale for a long time and they finally got and offer and accepted and right when they thought they could buy a home and move the sale was canceled the buyer backed out. So there is one for our family, a day before our insident with the fire we found out that my grandmother had fallen and literally broke her back and was in the hospital. So now we get to thinking we have had two things happen on both sides of the family something is going to happen to make it three, we just were hopping that it wasn't going to involve us. Well fate chose us as you can see. what happened, was on the night of the 8th of February it was a really cold night so just before Jace left for work I asked if he would start a fire so that the house would warm up. Now get this we had had fires in the fire place at least a dozen times this past winter already so we didn't expect anything. After he left I started to smell smoke and that wasn't to different because we always get just a little smoke from the fire place. Now I also have to say that I am allergic to smoke and I can smell it and get plugged up almost instantly upon smelling it. That said, I started to smell more then normal and started to get a big headache. I opened all the windows and went and checked the fire place and saw nothing out of the normal that would indicate in less then 10 min there was going to be a fire. I called Jace at work and informed him that there was more smoke in the house than normal and that I had to open all the windows to air out the place. At this point it was 10:15pm. He told me to try and stay up a little longer and let the windows stay open for the night but, my head hurt so bad and I was so tired that I just wanted to go to bed. I also guess that I am a wimp, where Jace works at night I never leave windows open just to make me feel safe, so needless to say I didn't listen to him and decided to close up the windows and go to bed. Well I was in bed and really started to smell smoke and could now see it in the dark winding in through my door from our front room. I ran out to the front room to see why it was worse and that is when I saw the flames coming up from between the chimney and carpet (our fireplace is in the basement). The flames where small and so I ran and got a bucket of water and poured it on the flames there and they seemed to die down so I grabbed my phone and a fire extinguisher and ran down stairs. I called Jace and told him we had a fire and that I needed him home and that I would call him in a minute to tell him to call the fire department if needed because I don't have much cell service in the basement. When I got downstairs the smoke was worse then we had upstairs. I got over to the fireplace and saw a huge crack on the chimney and saw that that it must have gotten too hot to quickly and it expanded and cracked and that was where the fire had come out. I saw some small flames there and tried to use the extinguisher but I couldn't get it to work no matter what I did. Luckily our water out put is no more then 10 feet away and luckily there was a bucket by it I had to throw water for about 10 minutes before I noticed it just smoking and the flames out, I then ran up stairs and poured more water on the chimney from there. That is when I noticed the huge crack went all the way up the chimney. At about this point Jace arrived home and I had him check the attic and see if there was any hint of fire there, luckily no crack, smoke, or fire up there. We called our insurance agent (we had called her not 3 days before and put fire insurance on our insurance because we noticed we didn't have any at our last appointment) We talked with her and were told that we didn't need to call for the fire department where I was able to get the fire out.