I was looking for a house to rent for the winter.
My husband and I wanted to move up north, but we were running out of time.
We had forgotten how quickly fall and winter arrived, since we haven’t lived up north for over three decades. We started talking to different realtors in hopes of finding the perfect house that we could rent with the option to buy. We thought we found the house we wanted when the last realtor called. She said she had a house that had a fireplace. I was so excited I couldn’t speak. There was a new HVAC system installed in the house, but the fireplace was the added something that we wanted. We knew that when the snow flew, it was highly likely that we could lose power. A fireplace was going to be perfect for us. We wouldn’t need to worry about going without heat. We weren’t used to the cold. When we got to the house, I was so disappointed that I nearly cried. The fireplace turned out to be nothing more than a large space heater, encased in a fireplace facade. I told the realtor we needed to keep looking. I wanted a real fireplace and not a fake one that wouldn’t work if we lost our power. I couldn’t believe that another realtor would advertise the house as having a fireplace when it wasn’t a fireplace. It took another couple weeks before we found the house we chose to rent, but it wasn’t a house we were willing to buy, even though it had a fireplace.