Oh the Joys of Apartment Life….

So the night before last we started having problems with our furnace.  The pilot went out at 1am and hubby could not get it lit.  The furnace here is ancient and the button that you push down and turn wouldn’t budge.  We called the emergency maintenance 3 times to no avail.  The maintenance here is atrocious.  But usually when you have a real emergency, they are out within half an hour to take care of it.  It was beginning to get chilly in the house and I was starting to worry about what we would do if we couldn’t get it lit.  Finally around 4 am hubby got it going again. 
It ran fine all night until the next afternoon when it went out again.  We called maintenance again and they came out and replaced the thermal coupling and got it going again. But alas, it went out again within a few  hours.  We called and the same guy came out again and said that there must be something more wrong, probably the air exchange.  Since the furnace in ancient, as I mentioned before, it would be next to impossible to find parts for it so we would need a new furnace.  He left again to see about getting us some space heaters until the next day, when they could see about getting a new furnace installed. 
He came back with one tiny electric heater.  He apologized for the inconvenience and told us that was all he could find.  We managed to keep the house reasonably warm through the night.  I did some laundry and kept the dryer running and we turned the oven on to keep it warm downstairs and we used the space heater in the hall upstairs.  However we had nothing running downstairs while we slept and boy was it frigid when I got up.  So I turned the oven on and ran some more laundry and brought the heater down to warm it up.  Maintenance came and measured this morning for the new furnace and said they would be back to install it later.  We are managing to stay warm in the meantime, and I’m making some major progress climbing Mt. laundry!
The thing I am most excited about is with a new furnace we are hopefully going to have a lower gas bill and be able to keep it warmer in here.  All of our front windows that face the wind are leaky, 2 of them having huge gaps where the cold air gets in.  When the wind blows, you can really feel it blowing in.  We have plastic AND blankets hanging over those windows and it helps but it is still very hard to keep the house uniformly warm.  In order to keep it warm downstairs, it is usually roasting upstairs.  Hopefully the new furnace will remedy this problem some.
I guess you could say the whole ordeal is a mixed blessing.  I will keep you updated on how things go once the new furnace is installed.

Blessings,

Cassie