Ding dong!

I'm taking a mini-break from the exciting replacement of door hardware to tell you about something I am actually super-pumped about.  Along with the broken doorknobs that were in my hallway, the other basic repair that I had benignly neglected for at least 6 months (but probably more) was my broken doorbell.

You can tell since the light is on that when I say "broken" I don't mean the actual function of the doorbell (i.e. ringing), but rather the button, which was all smashed in.  I have absolutely no idea how this happened - I like to imagine someone was so angry at me they walked up to my house and just punched the button and then ran away. 

I did a little online research and it seemed to be a fairly simple repair, so I decided to attempt it myself.  My biggest challenge was conquering my own fear of doing electrical stuff, and I thought this would be a good way to dip my toe in the water and try it out without really being able to do too much long-term damage (to myself or the house).

In all honesty, the hardest part of this whole thing was trying to figure out which fuse went with my doorbell to figure out how to turn off the power before I messed around with the wires.

On first glance, nothing obviously seemed to refer to the front of the house, or the exterior wiring, or anything even close.

I tried checking with my neighbors to see if the fuse for our doorbells was located in one of their units, because there have been some other things (like our main water shutoff) that is controlled from a central place.  We tried some stuff out, but then concluded that the right fuse must be one of the ones in my unit, and the only way to figure it out was simple trial and error.  The annoying part about that was it meant many, many trips up and down my stairs to turn off the fuse, then check if the power to the doorbell was off, and then if not, running back up stairs to try a different one...exercise?  After the 5th or 6th try, it turned out that it was the fuse labeled Master Bath and Bedroom.  What???  Oh well, I've just accepted that nothing is logical in this house.

So - once I could tell the light was out, I got out my fancy new voltage tester to see if I could confirm the power was off.

Check!  From there things went pretty quickly.  I just had to unscrew the wires from the old doorbell, and then attach them to the new doorbell.  You can see here how they just kind of curl around the two screws on the back.

Then I just screwed it back on, turned the power back on so I could test it, and there you have it!  Mission Accomplished.

I hope the BiteSquad guys will stop giving me a hard time about it now.

Doorknobs update

You guys, I may have discovered my real calling in life: installing doorknobs.  Seriously, I've become amazing at it.  There were some initial hiccups with the chiseling and whatnot, but I've come a long way.  I installed doorknobs 7, 8, and 9 this week, and let me tell ya - it was like a well-oiled machine up in here.  I realize it's kind of a lame skill to have, but I won't lie, it feels good to have basically mastered one DIY skill.

You might be wondering which other doors didn't yet have the new bronze doorknobs because surely I've bored you to tears with all this doorknob nonsense already.  But as it turns out, I hadn't yet done anything to the three doors upstairs, so I took care of that a couple nights ago.  These are the doors to the upstairs bathroom and storage closet, and then the door to the water heater and furnace room.  Here's what they looked like before with the same satin nickel finish as the old ones downstairs:

And now here they are with their nice new dark bronze doorknobs.

I know what a small thing this must seem like, but I honestly can't even tell you how much it pleases me to look at and use these new knobs.  The old knobs weren't horrible to look at or anything, but I hadn't even realized how much it irked me that they weren't quite functional until I got ones that actually were!  And I also hadn't realized how much I would prefer a different finish until I actually installed the first bronze one.  So in a way, I should be thanking Evan for getting himself locked in my bathroom - it put me on the oh-so-exciting new door hardware path that I am currently traveling.

While I'm sure you're not lying awake at night wondering what will happen to the rest of my doorknob project, let me tell you anyway.  No one wants this to be done with more than I, but alas, there's still a few more things to check off the list:

• Replacing the door hinges on all 11 doors.  Of course, they're all slightly different, so just assembling the right parts has been kind of a project in itself.  Plus, 2 or 3 hinges per door makes for quite a few hinges to replace.  I've called in the ladies to help.
• Replacing the deadbolt and keyed lock doorknobs on the two doors that go to the outside.  I'd previously been holding off on these until figuring out if I'd have to get my keys redone (I don't!), and now that I've gotten past that and am actually looking at purchasing, I found out that each set costs $50, and I need two.  Yeesh - over $100 for two doors???  Who knew?  So that's why I'm holding off now, but I'm thinking next month I'll take care of those and finish this up.

Knobhead

Since my last post on the subject, I got a lot of great feedback about what I should do with the ol' doorknobs.  Remember, the ones in the hallway that were a rainbow of various finishes?

Overwhelmingly, other people (and I) liked the dark bronze knob the best.  So, I guess we'll go with that and cross the other bridges of possibly changing hinges and door locks later on if it seems necessary.  I picked up knobs for the other three non-locking doors on the left of that hallway, the ones for the linen closet, the laundry room, and my bedroom.

I started out with the linen closet, which is kind of a janky door to begin with.  I'm 99% sure that the previous owners did some DIY of their own with this door, and so it's basically a piece of wood with a doorknob in it.  It's functional enough, but it's not fancy, and the carpentry leaves a lot to be desired.  This was demonstrated clearly when I tried to put on the new faceplate (the part that goes on the edge of the door where the latch closes).  The little opening that was carved there for the faceplate to sit in wasn't quite big enough.  This had happened with the other door I had done, but it wasn't a big deal because the other doors were made by real people or machines, and not by some little DIY elf, so there was enough room in the opening between the door and the door frame to accommodate that.  Not so with this one.

So I googled around for what to do about this, and the internet's consensus seemed to be that you could fix this yourself, literally by chiseling out a larger opening.  Seriously.  Well, I take that back - they said you could either chisel it out or use a saw of some sort to open it wider.  But I don't have any power tools (yet), so chiseling it is!  Because I was too cheap to actually go buy a chisel, I took my flathead screwdriver, placed it where I wanted to chisel parts away, and pounded on the end of it with my hammer.

This was not elegant work, but it was effective.  After doing this for a little while, I had opened it up enough that the faceplate could now fit in the door frame, so I installed the rest of the knob.

I realize that close-up this doesn't look great, but it's really not something anyone would ever notice unless you were really staring at it.

So, that problem solved, I moved on to the second door, which went off without a hitch.

 

Here's a pic of what the two finished doors look like across from the remaining satin nickel door, which goes to the back stairs.  So far I'm not super-bothered by the different finishes, but we'll see how it goes after a week or two.

Everything was going swimmingly, and then I got to the third door, which had looked the same as the other two on first glance, but which I now realized was actually different.  (Jeez - I've realized that the previous owners had installed not 1, 2 or 3, but FOUR - count 'em, FOUR - different types of doorknobs on the doors on the main hallway.  Okay, whatever, deep breath.)  At any rate, this door was different.  While the other ones were easy to remove, having two obvious screws that held the knobs onto the door, these had no such thing.  Here's a picture of one side of the door, which has a lock on the inside (because it's the bedroom):

No screws there...let's try the other side.

Now, you'd think that thing underneath the knob contains a screw, right?  And it would seem logical, except that I stuck a bunch of stuff in there, and there was absolutely nothing in there.  Nothing that I could even push against to help pry things off!  I twisted the knobs, I pulled the knobs, I even tried to use my screwdriver as a crowbar to get them off, but I came up completely empty.  I googled "how to remove doorknob without screws" and they basically described everything I had already tried, so I went for the nuclear option: I emailed my male friends.  One of them did indeed have a suggestion that turned out to be right (which was to twist on the side with the lock to see if it was a cover for the screws hidden behind it), but for whatever reason I couldn't get it to work until the spectacular Miss Jackie Nelson came over and gave it a whirl.  Success!

So I immediately got out my screwdriver and started replacing the knob so I could finally have my matching doorknobs.  Only to run into this.

The flipping door wouldn't close!  The faceplate on the door stuck out just a smidge too far from the door, which didn't allow it to fit in between the door and the strikeplate (the matching latch part on the door frame).  Once again, there was an issue with that carved-out hole that the faceplate sits in.  In this case, it was the right shape, as you can see here:

So that was fine, but it just wasn't carved deep enough in the door for the faceplate to sit flush.  The problem is that the new faceplate sticks out just a smidge farther than the old one.  In this picture below, the new one's on the left.

So here I was, back to square one.

Once again, I consulted with the men to find out if any of them had an appropriate power tool to deal with this and make the faceplate hole deeper.  (For some reason it did not occur to me that the solution to making it deeper would be the same solution (chiseling) as I had found for the problem of changing the shape with the previous door.)  But the boys knew: they unanimously agreed it was chisel time once again.  I got away with using the flathead screwdriver the first time, but since this was a bigger job I decided to go ahead and buy a chisel.

There was frustration and even some blood, but I eventually got it.

I can't get a shot of that hallway that shows all the doors together, but here's what this one looks like now on its own:

Cute, right?  I'm a fan.  This color makes it look so much more intentional and less like a hotel.  I was on kind of a roll, so I decided to do the closet doors that are in my living room too.

So you'll see from the pic above that I still haven't gotten around to dealing with the doors that open to the outside, because I'll have to figure out what to do about the locks.  But I'm settled on going down this road, so someday soon you should see them all be the same color.  Hinges too! 

Progress on New Year's resolutions

I can't remember when I last updated the blog on one of my New Year's resolutions, which was to develop some kind of plan to deal with all of my various forms of media (books, CDs, VHS tapes, cassette tapes, electronic stuff like email and iTunes).  Basically, here's my list of things in this category that I want to get done this year and which I've been slooooooowwwwly chipping away at.

• Organize photos on laptop
• Organize music on iTunes (i.e. I have a lot of weird random stuff that's found it's way there from various CDs I've burned that has the wrong artist or the wrong title or whatever.  The basic idea is to just make it easier to find what I'm looking for)
• Purge books (in progress)
• Purge CDs
• Burn CDs to iTunes (in progress)
• Purge VHS tapes (in progress)
• Buy replacement DVDs or convert select VHS tapes
• Purge cassette tapes
• Buy replacement iTunes or convert select cassette tapes
• Organize/purge Gmail
• Backup laptop media

So, as you can see from the crossed-out ones, I've accomplished some of this, and there are a number of other ones I've made some progress on.  As far as the cassette tapes, DVDs, and VHS tapes, here's where I started.  Everything is crammed in these two shelves - and trust me, they're stacked several rows deep, lest this look not that crowded to you.

I decided to start work on purging the VHS tapes since they take up the most space.  In order to get rid of them, I thought I'd try a couple different things.  First thing I did a couple months ago was that I cleaned out the bookcases and just stacked all of the VHS tapes in the corner.  I sorted them into a Disney pile (because they're a different size), a taped-off-the-TV pile (since these are some that I might want to either convert to a digital format or buy a better-quality version), and then a pile of all the other VHS tapes.

I find that when things are just sitting out there it's a good reminder to me to do something about it, because I just get more and more agitated seeing them sit there.  So I'm plenty agitated about these.  My first thought was that I'd try to sell these at a big garage sale that my friend usually has in the summer and get rid of as many as I could that way.  But that idea ran aground when it became difficult for my friend to schedule the sale.  So not knowing whether that was going to happen or not yet this summer, I felt like I needed to try something else because I'd slowly go insane having these sit in the corner.

My second plan was, if I can't sell them at a garage sale, why not try the next best thing, selling them on the interwebs?  I did a little research, and it turns out that there is in fact sort of a market for VHS tapes online!  Weird, but okay.  I set up my seller profile on Amazon, and decided to start with my Disney tapes, since I have some old ones and there seems to be a very specific market for those old clamshell cases.  I figured I'd just try it with a few of them to 1) see if any of them sold and 2) if I could actually make any money doing it. 

Without having to wait very long, I did actually get some answers when "The Little Mermaid" sold for $2.00.  WOOT!  Turns out I can sell them, but it is going to be very difficult to actually make it profitable.  In this case, I had to buy a pack of padded envelopes to mail it in for a cost of $1.55 per envelope.  Amazon charges the buyer whatever price I set (in this case, $2.00), then adds $3.99 for shipping, then subtracts its own fees, so I'm left with a profit of $3.35.  But once you subtract out the cost of the envelope ($1.55), and then the actual cost of the shipping ($3.43), I'm going to end up being pretty far in the hole if I sold a lot at this price.  So one solution would be to just price them all at a price where it's profitable, but then of course who knows if you'll sell any at all.  So I'll leave them up there for a while at a higher price and see what happens.

Meanwhile, I needed to figure something else out to get these things moving out of the house faster.  Somehow I stumbled on something on the internet that was about how there's a fair demand for VHS tapes from nursing homes because they're easier for the old folks to operate than DVDs.  Huh?  Well, okay.  Weirdly enough, I happen to have a coworker whose husband owns and runs a nursing home, so I asked him if he would want them and sure enough, he did!  So that's what I've decided to with the remainder of the non-Disney and non-taped-from-TV tapes.  It's not a nonprofit, so there won't be a tax deduction or anything, but it'll feel good to me to have them out of my house, and hopefully they'll bring some entertainment to somebody else, which feels better to me than putting them in the trash. 

And it's actually kind of perfect, because my tastes in entertainment pretty much mirror those of an elderly person.  The coworker asked me to go through them and look for ones that might not be appropriate for old people (the example given was "please, no 'Basic Instinct' " - ha!).  She needn't have worried.  My collection is almost entirely made up of '40s musicals, Jane Austen adaptations, dance movies, and classic dramas.  100% old people.  They're going to love it.