small victories in home maintenance

Prominent among my assorted shortcomings as a spouse and parent is a near-total ineptitude in the realm of home maintenance and repair (as evidenced by my previous posts on the subject). So, a few years ago, when our house’s carbon monoxide detector started its dystopian shrieking in the middle of the night to let us know that its battery was low, I blearily woke up, tore it out of the wall, disassembled it until it stopped sounding like something out of 1984, and decided to worry about it in the morning.

It wasn’t long before I’d forgotten where I’d put the detector and the “replace carbon monoxide detector battery” task in my to-do app joined a bunch of other aspirational home maintenance tasks as things I feared I would never really get to. Several weeks ago, though, someone I follow on Bluesky (well, via RSS) posted about his family’s carbon monoxide detectors going off, and that was spooky enough for me to feel urgent about not having any detectors in the house.

I did some research and decided to replace our smoke detectors with combination detectors that would detect both smoke and carbon monoxide. After a trip to Lowe’s and spending what felt like way too much money (but safety first, I guess), I finally had the equipment I needed to feel safe again. The problem was that the breaker panel has long been my spouse’s domain, not mine, and I knew I needed to flip off the right circuit to safely install everything, so the detectors sat around for another few weeks until some of our summer chaos calmed down and we were both around the house and had enough time to tackle it together.

That was yesterday! Kiddo hunkered down with a book, spouse took care of the breaker panel, and I armed myself with a stepladder and screwdriver to get the darn thing done. Given that I honestly can’t remember how long we’ve gone without carbon monoxide detectors in the house, I ought to be feeling pretty sheepish at how long this took me to get done, but I actually feel pretty proud of myself instead! It helps that one of the smoke detectors I replaced had been there for a couple of decades, seemingly never noticed by the previous owners, so maybe I’m not the only one who struggles with all of this stuff.

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• carbon monoxide detectors
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