DIY

Our front door bell has been misbehaving for some time now, with some members of the household having difficulty hearing it. An old fashioned door bell, with dome & striker, wired to the nearby bell push. Nearby, but on the other side of the door. Changing the batteries did not seem to help much.

Gradually, I cranked myself up to thinking about the problem. We pondered about where there might be a decent choice of such things, opting for B&Q (Leatherhead), with Wilko (Epsom) and Robert Dyas (Epsom) in reserve.

Notwithstanding this review of options, I wandered into Robert Dyas a day or two later, where a helpful member of staff led me to a small choice of door bells. Within a few minutes I had opted for the cordless, chiming number illustrated, attracted in part by it having two ringer units, one plugged in (and so not needing batteries) and one (with batteries) which one could place somewhere convenient, or even carry about. The small, watch-like battery in the bell push was alleged to last about a year.

A little experimentation demonstrated that the wireless connection between the bell push and the two ringer units did indeed work. It seemed to have a good range and not to be disturbed by intervening walls.

Next step, dismantle the existing door bell, an operation which was clearly going to require a fair amount of making good - even if the end result was going to be a lot neater and smarter than what we had before. An operation which revealed that the precipitating problem was probably the wire through the door frame to the bell push having been pulled hard enough at some point for one of the pair of connections to have nearly come adrift. With poor connection resulting in poor ring. No real need to have replaced it at all...

Next step, install the new one. Revealing once again how hard I find it to get things like plug sockets - and bell pushes - quite straight, even when one is fixing on softwood. BH usually notices such things, but she has yet to mention this one. Perhaps she is very pleased with her new door bell, which, so far, is working very well.

Next step, make a start with the scraper, sander and Polyfilla. A bonus here being that I have finally got around to filling the four small craters dotted about the house resulting from flakes of ceiling plaster skim falling off from over plasterboard fixing nails.

Several next steps involving sanding, undercoat, top coat and so forth yet to come. Guesstimated completion date: 22nd March.

PS: I have a memory, quite possibly fabricated, that my mother regarded chiming doorbells as epitomising most of what she disliked about living on a suburban housing estate amid suburban housewives with perms and frocks. We had a larger version of the dome and striker mentioned above, wired into the mains. Good strong ring and no nonsense about batteries. In my defence, I should say that our new doorbell has a choice of four chimes, but I have yet to try that out, settling for the default, at least for the present.