Burned my house down in 2015.

I was really into competition BBQ at the time and had 4 smokers on my covered deck out back and went to clean out the ash from my Pit Barrel Cooker on the Sunday morn after a cook the previous day.

I thought that there would be no way that there would be any coals still going after 12 plus hours but I was wrong. I reached in and scooped a bunch of ash and recoiled at the heat, inadvertently flinging ash and smoldering coals all over my deck.

I thought I had swept everything up but unfortunately a bit of the coals fell between the cracks and slowly caught the leaves under my deck on fire.

I caught it early and tried to put it out with my extinguisher but couldn't get to it properly because of how low my deck was and the amount of leaves built up underneath it.

Next thing I knew, the propane tank I had hooked up to the other grill I had blew and the entire backside of my house was engulfed.

I was running around in my boxers and T-shirt trying to get my poor cat when the whole backside of my house caved in like something out of Backdraft or something. I got separated from my cat due to the cave in and ran out of my house sure he was dead. My poor neighbors probably thought "who is that woman screaming about her cat?!?!" (I'm a dude BTW) b/c I was running around like a crazy person in my boxers and ashed and burned T-Shirt screaming about my cat.

About 20 min later a firefighter came running our of my house carrying my burned and smoky cat. They put him in a little oxygen pet carrier thing they had and got him to our local animal emergency room. He was in a bad spot for a while but ended up recovering nicely.

All in all it was a awful day and I ended up having to move back in with my parents for a year but once everything was rebuilt I ended up with an awesome new house. I had about 20 years of projects I wanted to do to get it updated but I was able to do everything in one fell swoop once the insurance money kicked in. Of course they dropped me like a bad habit once I was moved back in a everything was closed out.