Platinum-selling hitmaker Chris Janson admits he often has trouble sleeping, especially in the springtime when his allergies are the worst. But on one particular night in April, the country music wordsmith found himself finally content and enjoying a deep sleep when he suddenly felt a tap on his shoulder.
And it's that tap that just might have saved him and his family's lives.
"Thank God, God woke up my wife Kelly," Janson, 35, tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview about the recent fire at his home located just south of Nashville. "If it weren't for her hearing that faint 'beep, beep' of the fire detector, it could have been very bad."
Because directly underneath their bedroom, a fire was raging.
"This was not a little fire," the Grand Ole Opry member remembers of the fire that raged earlier this month in his basement studio. "This was a legit, '7-foot flame, taller than me' fire. It was a 'melting my ceiling fan onto my ottoman' fire."
After safely evacuating Kelly and children Georgia and Jessie from the increasingly smoky home, the Missouri native quickly called 911 to summon first responders from the Williamson County Fire Department to come and extinguish the fire.
But while he waited, the Missouri native decided to take matters in his own hands, trying his best to put out the fire with huge buckets of water he filled continuously until the first responders arrived.
"I went into survival mode," admits Janson, who has found himself on the top of the country music charts in recent years with hits such as "Drunk Girl," "Good Vibes" and "Buy Me a Boat." "The fire melted my ottoman and literally created a campfire essentially right in the middle of my studio room. Thankfully, it didn't burn the house."