TIFU by almost burning my house down thinking the refrigerator died tifu

Obligatory: this happened about a week ago. My wife-(ish) and I own a two-family house and have moved from the upstairs unit to the downstairs unit. This happened during the move to what is effectively a new apartment for us.

The previous occupants (our tenants) were really good tenants in that they never complained about anything. I thought this meant that nothing needed to be fixed; this turned out to be incorrect. There were a LOT of problems in the apartment like broken outlets, light switches, doors that don't quite close right, and the appliances like the stove and fridge are very old and had a lot of rust stains on them.

We decided that we wanted to move the fridge from one end of the kitchen to the other, so we unplugged it and started dragging it across the kitchen to the other side of the stove. Right as I did that, I started smelling a putrid, rotting egg smell. Wifey and I decide that this fridge has had it. It's ugly, smelly and HAS to go. So, we open all the windows, sit down and start online shopping for new refrigerators. We even put the old one back to the old position and plug it in again.

We get distracted by other things in the whole experience of moving and get tired so go to sleep for the night. Next morning, we wake up and the fridge and kitchen STILL smell terrible. We are very saddened that our new apartment (which was supposed to be nicer overall than the upstairs apartment) has so many broken things and a smelly fridge.

It's right about that time that I take a look at the stove again and notice that one of the stove knobs is not like the others. Turns out it wasn't the fridge, but natural gas flooding our kitchen with the sweet smell of liquid egg diarrhea. We must have turned it a bit accidentally when moving the fridge and they must have changed the formula of the additive because nether of us recognized the smell.

tldr; we moved to a new apartment, thought the fridge was making a bad smell, turned out to be natural gas from the stove we accidentally turned on, almost blew up the house

EDIT: formatting

Submitted August 17, 2016 at 05:47PM by thatsnotyourhat http://ift.tt/2b3WUGH tifu