Angels Getting Wings

Sorry for the delay, friends. Although my blog is being told in the past tense, I should come clean and admit that we're STILL doing projects. The past couple of weekends have been filled with exhausting physical labor (a post for another day), which left me too tired to put thoughts into words.

I'd like to thank my dear ol' dad for the prompt for this little post. Dad commented on the "Enter at Your Own Risk" post that the first house of my childhood had a set of chimes housed in the hall closet. That reminded me that you might like to see the workings that go along with our new doorbell.

The doorbell chimes live in the dining room. When we bought the house, there was a Nutone bakelite chime with two long tubes (I'd guess 30" and 36", respectively). The bakelite cover had been painted over in the same color as the wall, with the same amount of care (none). It was apparently too much trouble to remove the two screws from the chime to take it down when they last painted, so they just painted over the thing. Logically, if it's too much trouble to remove two screws, it's also too much trouble to mask off the brass tubes.  This resulted in paint all along the back side of each tube. Stay with me now...it it's too much trouble to remove two screws and if it's too much trouble to mask off tubes, it's ALSO too much trouble to wipe down walls before painting. The result of that is hair embedded into the paint. Finding hair in painted walls (and chimes) is a minor step up from finding it in food, in my opinion.

Anyway, I never took a photo of the chimes on account of how disgusting they were to me. I've searched online for a match, but had difficulty finding one. It's probably super rare and worth a million dollars. We gave it to Goodwill. Anyway, this one is pretty close--so picture this, but gross. Also, the wiring had a disconnect, so it didn't work and we never got to hear it (except for our knocking the tubes manually to imagine it).

Less gross version of similar original chimes.

We're geeks for hardware, so we welcomed the excuse to upgrade. We found this antiqued brass reproduction model at Rejuvenation. When you press the doorbell, the chime says, "BING BONG!"

Mash it like you mean it.	Bing BONG!