Nora the Explorer

I have been working on a huge home improvement project since New Year's Day.  We had pulled up the carpet in the living room, upstairs hall, and on the stairs last summer, in the hopes of refinishing the floor.  After much deliberation, we decided to redo the floors ourselves, covering them in book pages and putting varnish polyurethane on top.  It has been a lot of work, but the results have been awesome.  The upstairs hall and the stairs are done, so this week we started on the living room floor.

We moved all the furniture out of the room, and scrubbed the floor.  We have two registers in the living room, so we had to remove the covers.  I spent more than 2 days gluing the paper covering on the floor.  Yesterday, we took a day off to allow the glue to fully dry before we moved on to varnishing.  We have had to keep the dogs off of the floor completely, but Nora has been fine, and pretty much stayed away from the floor.  Until last night.

We had the dogs upstairs, watching a movie.  As the movie was wrapping up, we heard a loud metallic bang from downstairs.  I figured it was Nora just horsing around (she does that a lot at night).  When we went downstairs to take the dogs out, we could hear Nora crying, but could not find her anywhere.  We called, she cried, but she did not come out of hiding.  After listening to her crying, I made a horrifying discovery.

Nora had crawled into the ductwork of our heating system, from the uncovered vent in the living room.  I was immediately concerned that she was injured, or that we would be unable to get her out of the ductwork. We shut the furnace off and started trying to locate her.  It sounded like she was walking around, and we thought we could coax her out with food, but it did not work.  The ducts are riveted so we could not even unscrew anything to try to rescue her.  We worried and fussed for about an hour.

Finally, Hubby removed the filter in the furnace, and said he could see Nora.  She had made her way all the way into the actual furnace. We were able to remove a cover from a portion of the furnace and rescue her.  It was quite the harrowing, and heartbreaking.  As you may remember, this is not the first time Nora has tangled with a vent.

Once we got her out, and made sure she was safe and unharmed, we gave her an extra plate of food.  Nora will be contained in the basement until the floor is finished and the register covers are back in place.  And her vent investigation excursion has earned her a new nickname: Nora the Explorer.