It was cold and drafty without the fireplace.
My husband and I had a fireplace in the living room to help offset the heating bills.
We loved our central HVAC system.
We wouldn’t want to go without central air conditioning during the summer, but the winter was different. It was expensive to run a furnace, and we often lost electricity when the winds whipped around the mountain tops. Without a fireplace, we wouldn’t stay warm all winter. The fireplace offset the heating bills and comforted us when the lights went out and the furnace wasn’t working. Last month, we had a storm that had the electricity off for almost a week. The fireplace was comfortable, and we slept in front of it, on an old pull-out sofa bed. The fireplace went out in the middle of the night, and I was shivering. I didn’t realize how cold and drafty our house could be without the fireplace. I vowed to never get rid of the fireplace, because I also realized why it was so expensive to heat the house. I knew that when spring arrived; I was going to call a contractor and have new insulation installed throughout the house. I wanted the chimney cleaned, and I was going to consider having a new furnace installed. Maybe some of the reason for the expense of running the furnace was because it was almost twenty-five years old. If the insulation and new furnace didn’t help to keep the house warmer, I would have another fireplace installed somewhere else in the house. I just wanted to get my home warmer.