So, I did end up doing a lot of work on the house last week, mostly painting and cleaning and doing a few other things to get the house ready to sell. Here we have a pic of Matt nailing up molding in the downstairs bathroom, which I just finished painting. You may notice a square hole in the ceiling there, just inside the door frame. Working in the bathroom last week reminded me of the story of how that hole came to be there, almost exactly two years ago.
It was in February, two years ago. We had had a very hard year. I had gone through surgeries for cancer and had a brand new baby, we had three deaths in the family in a very short span, and I had just finished a major radiation treatment and was still getting back on my feet, and needless to say, our nerves were somewhat fried. Anyways, one of our smoke detectors was giving us the 'low battery' signal and would emit a single 'beep' once every few minutes. I ignored it for a few days (lots of problems can be solved by ignoring them for a few days), but finally got tired of hearing the stupid 'beep' and asked Matt to replace the batteries. Good man that he is, he replaced the battery in the upstairs smoke detector (the one I had assumed was beeping) and then joined me on the couch to relax for the evening.
As soon as he sat down, we heard the 'beep' again. Me- "Don't you know how to put in the batteries?" Him- "Do you think I'm stupid? I know how to put in batteries!" So, we go upstairs to investigate. As we were standing there with the smoke detector in hand, we again heard the 'beep'. Well, obviously it must be the downstairs smoke detector, since it wasn't the one Matt was holding. Down the stairs we went to the lower level to fix our problem. Again, while we were standing right under the smoke detector, we heard the 'beep' again, and it was most definitely not coming from this one, either! So what was beeping and where was it coming from?!!
Now we were on a mission. We couldn't just keep ignoring the beeping, but we couldn't figure out where it was coming from. The 'beep' only went off once every few minutes, so we listened, then hurried over to where we thought the sound was coming from, and then waited and listened for the next beep. When we were upstairs, it most certainly sounded like the sound was coming from downstairs. When we listened downstairs, it sounded like it was coming from upstairs! With my ear to the ground in the upstairs hallway, I could swear it was coming from underneath the floor. Directly below the hallway is the downstairs bathroom. I stood listening for the beep, with my ear to the drywall, trying to pinpoint where the sound was coming from. It was inside the wall!
A little bit of back story. Almost exactly a year prior to this incident, we had some major renovations done to the house, in anticipation of our new baby. We gutted the back of the lower level right down to the studs, and had all new drywall, windows, and floors put in. Sure enough, in the chaos that accompanies a major project like that, someone had taken the smoke detector off the wall that was being torn down, and set it on top of some exposed duct work to be out of the way for the moment. The project progressed, new drywall went up over the ducts, and the old smoke detector was long forgotten.
Until the batteries ran low and it started beeping. From behind the drywall.
I went and got a hammer and utility knife, and listened again for the 'beep', trying very carefully to pin down its precise location. I took my best guess, and cut a small hole in the bathroom ceiling. The next 'beep' was much louder. Matt reached up into the hole and felt around, and sure enough, he was able to reach the smoke detector. The hole I cut wasn't big enough to pull the detector out, so Matt disconnected the old battery, and alas, the beeping stopped.
You can still see the old smoke detector up through the hole in the ceiling. Two years later, I am just getting around to patching the hole in the drywall. I hate to think what would have happened if I had burned dinner or something at some time during the smoke detector's time behind walls, or if it was too far up out of reach for Matt to get to. All's well that ends well,I suppose.
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