A few thoughts about fireplace safety. First of all, fireplaces are largely outdated, a romantic traditional memory of awfully inconvenient and inefficient wood heating. In some of the old log cabins, chimneys were built so that they could be kicked away to fall away from the house, in case of a chimney fire.
And I don't understand what for all the ornamental wood and wood mantels. My house came with 2 fireplaces, but its all brick and noncombustibles, all the way to the ceiling. No mantel. No decorative surrounding wood. With only heavy masonry, it might even take it a while, to even get hot?
Wood isn't really such a safe material to burn. It doesn't burn clean enough, and creosote can build up, setting fire to the chimney some evening with a romantic and a bit too hot, fire. Wood burns hot, but is fickle and quickly gets too cold, if not continually prodded and stirred and tended. And most all the heat goes up the chimney. I think that vent-free gas logs do the job far better, because while not so hot, they are very consistant, and with the really cool wall-mounted thermostat option, powered totally by the heat of the pilot light, they can almost replace the furnace for heating much of the house, for most of the winter except when real cold outside. When I moved in, it didn't take long, before I converted to gas logs. Nice warm cozy-looking fire, without all the mess or risks. Just a simple log set, with a little orange flame, and a glowing hot ceramic log. Some of them are just too fancy. Too much heat output isn't desirable anyway. The room soon warms enough, and the thermostat shuts things down, leaving a cold dark hole of a fireplace. No, I run them usually on low. I want them to stay on longer, and if not enough heat on low, then the furnace needs to cycle a few times anyway, to push a little heat to the extremes of the house. I set the furnace thermostat just a little lower, so that it can "help" when needed. So what do I do now, with the connected masonry fireplace in the other room? What a useless hole in the wall.
Wood fires may be romantic and cozy and all that, but I think these days, the nice hot roaring fires, belong better outside, in a nice campfire setting. Outside where it really is cold, that radiant heat and glow, can feel mighty nice.
I also feel a bit uneasy about how close some electric stove ovens are to the surrounding wooden cupboards. It's easy not to much notice, how heat may build up and get trapped. A few inches clearance may be safer?
And some of those electric appliances may not be so safe as they appear. A couple areas of concern. Appliances that use lots of electricity and are small and encased in plastic. Such as coffee makers. I saw how they test safety of such things, on some TV show many years back. They bypassed the thermostat, which on such devices may be a bit shoddy and made too cheaply and stick? To simulate what might happen should the thermostat ever get stuck on. It melted within a minute and soon caught on fire. I would not want one of those in my home. If I had a spouse that wanted one, I think I should spring for the several hundred dollars, and get some coffee maker made of metal, like what they put in restaurants. They also vice-gripped-clamped some blade of a circular saw so that it would be jammed, and taped the trigger switch on. I think it may have smoked slightly or something, but it did nothing spectular at all. Much better.
I think it was in Reader's Digest many years ago, I read some joke about some poor guy, who when he and his wife left to go on vacation, his wife would always, while driving along the way, fear she had left the iron on. So they had to go back and check. Finally the guy got smart. When she feared the iron had been left on, he pulled over and pulled the iron from the trunk.
I also hear that lint building up in the clothes dryer hose, is a common source of fires. Might be good to disconnect things once in a while, and perform an inspection? Could be a reason to go outside and use the clothes line, which is better for the clothes anyway, if only it wasn't so cold outside, so inconvenient, or threatening to rain?
I am so glad you were quick thinking enough to tame the flames until the fire department arrived! Whatever you did was very smart. 
