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.