Smoke Detector (Or How I stopped worrying and learned to love the cave)

Even though it has undergone a major transformation (see the biggest changes here and here), I still call our hallway the cave.  It's not cave-like anymore.  I'll just always lovingly call it that.  Everytime I say "The Cave" I think of the early days in our house when we were still figuring out what it would end up looking like.  The early days of drywall and carpet removal and new hardwoods and popcorn ceilings and paint.  Okay, enough reminiscing.  Onto my point.

The smoke detector in our hallway looked like this when we moved in:

It just didn't seem safe to me.  And it certainly didn't look good.  So, after a year of imagining my house burning in a horrible fire every time I walked through the cave, I took some action.  Better late than never, right?

I got my supplies together.  New smoke detector, step stool, awesome American flag screwdriver.

Since I was taking the old smoke detector down anyways and (unlike the one in the kitchen) the smoke alarm isn't hardwired into the ceiling, I decided to move it.  It used to be located here, right between the vent and the (broken) light fixture:

Though it was totally fine there, it didn't look as great as I knew it could.  The vent/smoke detector/light fixture sight line was a little much for me.  So, I took the smoke detector down, and was left with a small circle of popcorn ceiling that was never removed:

I removed the popcorn, patched up the ceiling, and repainted (ceiling is SW's Pure White).  The smoke detector is now tucked right on the other side of the light fixture.  Doesn't that look cleaner?

And I know that it works.  And it is super easy to test and super easy to change the batteries.  I feel safer and it looks better.  I'm going to call this project a bit WIN.

Dog Food Storage

The day before we got the dog, Matt and I went shopping for all of the supplies he would need.  Because we buy his dog food at Costco, we needed a big container to store it in.  We picked this one up at Walmart for less than $10:

While totally functional, it was a little bland for my tastes.  The dog food container sits in the corner of our pantry and we see it everytime we open the door (which is every time we cook a meal).  Taking my cue from this post over at House of Hepworths (HoH), I spent about an hour transforming my boring old dog food container into this:

In the project posted on HoH, the crafter used her silhouette machine to make the words and the paw prints.  I don't have a silhouette machine, so I just used a printout and a sharpie.  I printed my words and image, traced them onto my dog food container, and filled it in with sharpie.  Super easy and super cute.  And of course, puppy approved: