Ding Dong!

On Wednesday, my pilot husband left for flight safety for five days. Last time he was gone, a crew of my homies came and helped me re-do our bedroom and bathroom, including, but not limited to painting walls, furniture, light fixtures, moving furniture, and bringing in new blinds, towel bars, bedding, curtains, lamps, towels, etc. It is sublime. Truly. The oasis I’ve always dreamed of having.

This set of five days, I calmed the heck down and decided on installing a new doorbell. Assuming this would be a 15 minute job, I didn’t start til Thursday. Seriously, look how easy these instructions are! Remove! Connect! Mount! BAM!

You see, our doorbell has not chimed it’s beautiful song to signal the arrival of guests for approximately six years. It wasn’t real high on our to-do list, clearly. Here is the old doorbell in all of it’s fake brass glory with three-year-old stickiness from tape that held the sign, “Knock Loudly.” So classy, us Clampetts.

This was my first attempt at changing a doorbell, but I consider myself quite handy. (Please see previous posts of my success building chicken coops and installing a water filter in the fridge.)

Standing in the doorbell section of the local hardware establishment, I found a little cheapy button replacement and figured I could scrub and spray paint the vintage brass circle then install the new button. Lo and behold, the little nonfunctional button pictured above was not removable.

Back to the hardware store for a classy black doorbell with it’s own lighted button for your nighttime pushing pleasure. Now it’s Friday. Rick comes home on Sunday. (Please note the paint on my hand……..)

After removing the dead doorbell, I realized that the new doorbell was smaller in size than the ghastly brass number. AND our house was just painted two weeks ago so the old dismal peachy-tan color stuck it’s tongue out at me all the way around the classy new job.

Locating the mammoth paint drum was the easy part of touching up the paint around the doorbell cavity. Upon setting down the paint pail in front of the doorbell location I noticed the easily-removable, small plastic lid on the giant lid. Perfect! It popped right out with a simple tug, but the paint was a good 15″ below the top. Even with my 16″ paintbrush it wasn’t going to fly. I snapped the little cap back in place and tipped the paint drum upside down to coat the inside of the little cap. Worked like a charm! Using the white cap as my pallet, the paint job was completed in three quick minutes. BAM!

As I forced the little cap back into it’s hole, realization hit that it splatted paint the first and second times I closed the paint…. and the little white dots were waving at me from my turquoise pants. Hurrying to the kitchen sink, I grabbed a rag and scrubbed and scrubbed until there was no further paint removal progress happening. Favorite turquoise pants are now spotted painting pants.

Remember the paint on my hand? … Below is evidence of where it transferred to the kitchen rag cupboard door.

After the paint dried and my pants dried to a nice polka-dot look, the doorbell was installed. Sweet victory! Tonight I went out the front door to take a gander at the lighted up Cadillac version of a doorbell on our front porch. It sort of has a calming Close Encounters glow to it, doesn’t it?

Time tally:  two trips to the store, 1.5 hours. Removing old doorbell and gathering tools, 15 min. Scrubbing spiderwebs away from the hole with an old toothbrush, 5 minutes. Locating, shaking, opening paint, 10 min. Painting, 3 min. Scrubbing pants, 11 min. Cleaning paintbrush, porch, kitchen cupboard, feet and shoes, 18 min. Installing new doorbell, 4 min. BAM!       TWO HOURS THIRTY SIX MINUTES.

Remove! Connect! Mount! LIES!

Tags: ding dong ditch, diy, doorbell, doorbell ditch, hardware store, mama can fix it, paint, paint brush, paint drum, paint pants, paint the house, re-do, re-wire