The sad story of the imprisoned smoke detector

So. about a week and a half ago we begin hearing this occasional chirp. The chirp that a smoke alarm makes when the battery is low. We have 12 smoke detectors in this house (what? Paranoid? nah!) so for a couple days we listened and tried to figure out which one it was. We couldn't track the sound, it was so random and spaced out so we figured that since most of these smoke alarms went in during our remodel, either being the new hard-wired variety or simply having been replaced we would just change out the batteries in them all. If one was low they were surely all getting low.

So Friday my husband does just that. He spends an insane amount of money on batteries and sets to changing every battery in every smoke detector. That should do it!

Until....... CHIRP. WHAT? we looked at each other slightly confused. How the hell is one still chirping? So we go to work in earnest, hours spent standing in various places trying to trace the chirp to figure out which one it is. Ok maybe not hours, but there's a good possibility.

Finally we trace it to the basement stairs. Except there's no smoke detector on the basement stairs.......... My husband looks at me with this "Oh shit" type of expression on his face as he realizes what has happened.

"Do you remember, before the basement was finished we had that smoke alarm that sat on the little ledge in the stairway?" He asks as I too realized our problem. My husband sheetrocked the smoke alarm in.

"We'll just leave it, the battery should die soon" I say.

Well, by last night I had had enough of the damned chirping. "Tomorrow, you are doing whatever it takes to find that thing and remove it's life force" I tell my sweet husband who formulates a plan that involves the least amount of distruction to his stairwell masterpeice.

This morning I wake up to the sound of a jigsaw. He's cutting a small hole in the sheetrock to find the smoke alarm, remove it, and replace the small peice. Great idea right?

Except the hole he cut was in the WRONG PLACE. It was on the shelf ABOVE the one he'd remembered.

"Now what?" he asks as I walk past time upstairs not saying a word. Sorry buddy, this is your thing.

He reaches in his hole and is able to find the smoke alarm and fiddle with it enough to get the cover off. But when he does, the chirping stops. Hey! Maybe that's fixed!

So this afternoon I'm taking a nap in my big comfy recliner and am awakened to the sound of ........hammering? Bang Bang Bang followed by BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP........ BEEPBEEPBEEP. Now ya did it.

15 minutes later the beeping AND the hammering fell silent forever as my dear king emerged from his lair with a mangled 9 volt battery in hand. God I love that man.

Now when is he going to fix the wall I wonder?