The Postman Always Rings

Our big excitement last month was moving the doorbell. The fun just never stops.

For as long as we've been here, the doorbell chime has been mounted more or less in the midpoint of the house. It's down low on a wall in one of the 2nd-floor rooms. You can hear it from just about anywhere, so no problems there. It wasn't very nice to look at, though, and the doorbell wires had to follow a remarkably twisted route to get there. Let me explain.

From the doorbell button by the front door, the wires go through a little hole in the wood trim, down the length of the door frame until they reach the crawlspace under the house, then 30' over to a transformer that dangles in midair, supported only by its wires. From there, the wires went up through a hole in the floor, appeared along the 1st-floor molding, ran up a door frame to the ceiling, through a hole, reappeared in a 2nd-floor closet, through the closet wall, along a bedroom wall, through another door frame, and along some more floor molding before finally reaching the doorbell chime itself.

I can't imagine how (or why) someone worked so hard to place the doorbell in exactly that location. It's just nuts.

I wanted to move the doorbell to a less-conspicuous place, and, incidentally, clean up the circuitous wiring. We found a good spot just 10' away near the stairs. Since the space under the stairs is hollow, it provides plenty of room to mount the doorbell and run the wires. And, since the stairs are also right next to the old dumbwaiter shaft, I've got a big vertical runway all the way down to the crawlspace. Voila! Instant wiring chase.

Dropping the new wires (as in, literally dropping them down the shaft until they hit the dirt under the house) was super easy. The only tricky part was disconnecting the old doorbell wires and replacing most of that old rat's nest. Oh, and I replaced the little DC transformer and screwed it down to a floor joist instead of just letting it just hang there in midair. Sheesh.

We tested the doorbell and it's louder! I think all that old wire was putting up some serious resistance, so the new wire provides noticeably more current. An added bonus. But mostly I just like tidying up the old wires. We could probably recycle the copper for some real money.

The Doors, Vol. 2

It's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: As soon as we finish some task it's time to do it all over again.

Case in point this week is the back door to the upstairs kitchen. I "fixed" this a few years ago (March 2011) but now it was time to fix it for real. When we moved in (exactly six years ago today!), this door had one panel cut out, probably for a cat door. The DPO had replaced the empty hole with a cheap piece of plywood. We, in turn, replaced that with a finely crafted replacement panel that lasted about five years.

My mistake was in making the replacement out of MDF, which doesn't stand up to weather very well. After five years of getting rained on, it was coming apart. So I un-hung the door, put it up on saw horses, and removed all my old work. What a mess. Now we're back to the way it was five years ago, with a hole in it.

This time, the replacement panel is made out of solid pine, which should withstand the weather much better. It's also got several coats of primer and caulk around all the edges so that it won't trap water anywhere.

The real trick, though, is getting the panel into place. The door was originally assembled in pieces with tongue-and-groove panels, rails, and stiles. The panels are "trapped" inside grooves cut into the rails and stiles, so you can't just casually pop in a replacement without disassembling the entire door. Cutting out the old panel was easy. Putting in a new one is a whole different problem.

What I wound up doing was building up the replacement panel in three pieces, like a kindergartner's jigsaw puzzle. One piece fits into the top and right-hand grooves. A twin piece fits into the bottom and left-side grooves. And a third piece goes in between the other two, forcing them apart to create a snug fit. Once they were all assembled, I glued and sanded the whole assembly to hide the seams.

Once that was done, I recreated the raised panel in the middle using another piece of solid pine. (There are two of those; one on each side of the door.) That was fairly straightforward: Bevel off the edges using a table saw at about 35 degrees, and then add the eight vertical grooves with the router. I sanded off all the sharp edges and even nicked it in a few places to make it look old and worn.

One problem I didn't anticipate was curling. I splashed some primer onto the raised panel, and the moisture in all those parallel grooves caused it to roll up like a cylinder. I had to spray some water onto it and weight it down with my toolbox to get it to lie flat again. After a few days it was fine and I could attach the two raised panels onto the door panel, one inside and one outside. Then a few more coats of primer and some more caulk made sure it wouldn't trap rainwater.

Here's the replacement panel next to an original one. Can you tell which is which? With any luck, these should last another five years or so!