Who designed this place?!

Recognize this? It's your average smoke detector. You're supposed to change the batteries every year. They should be found in every room of the house or at least in appropriate spots. Now if you're supposed to change the batteries, wouldn't you place your smoke detector in an accessible spot? Well take a look at where one of our detectors is located.

How on earth are we supposed to reach this?

This is the stairwell. The detector is located about halfway down the stairs and obviously out of reach. To make matters worse Thursday morning the detector started chirping, letting us know that the battery was running low. Thursday night around 10:30 as we were heading to bed it started chirping again. ARG we forgot about it until then. It chirped several times throughout the night and was chirping again Friday morning. Peter had Friday off and went and got a ladder from his parents house. Only problem is how do you reach the detector from the middle of the stairs. This was a regular ladder so the legs were the same length and not adjustable. So what do we do??? Mind you the detector was chirping all day Friday so the first thing on Peter's mind was fixing the detector and make the chirping stop. So what does the engineer think of? Well while the ladder is folded he leans it up against the stairs. My job is to hold the ladder from falling over while Peter fixes the detector. It wasn't easy, but in the end he fixed it. About five minute afterwards the dang thing chirped again, but we haven't heard it since then.

Peter drew this picture on the computer to help you get an idea of what we did to fix the problem. Mind you I was given the option to be the one on the ladder, but that didn't sound fun to me and I'm a good half a foot shorter than Peter. I would've had to climb up farther on an unsteady ladder.

On a different subject...looking back at the second picture you see our stairwell is a bit empty. There's a light on the wall and a framed needlework that I did. We have the huge space above the light that is empty and Peter and I are taking any suggestions on what we should do with the space. Or really with any of the space on the wall. We really need help!