Ding Dong the Doorbell's Dead

So our house is old. Straight up that's All there is to it.

Well, we have updated it with some fresh paint which has been SO refreshing. I'll post pictures soon, we still have a bit of trim to paint before it's finished, but it already looks 10x better. I think I've ranted about this before, but our house was painted 10 different colors when we moved in. Now the downstairs (minus the hallway and laundry room) are all painted. Now our front room and tv room is one color, our dining room and kitchen is one color, and the bathroom and bedroom are one color. Much better.

I am actually surprised at how well I did taking pictures to document the doorbell update. I wish I had done this with the rest of the house. I think you would appreciate my documentation/ pictures of the house so much better if you saw what it looked like before we started working on it.

I know Chris has a few pictures, so I'll see if I can get them to show the pre/post house look.

So far, we have installed ALL outside doors, which means they actually lock now!!!!! And we have keys now!!!! (The one door didn't close completely and two of them didn't lock, so MAJOR improvement right there, and you can probably see now a little more why I started crying when I first saw the house like I mentioned here.)

Anyway, I'm slightly digressing from the purpose of this post. We painted the dining room and kitchen yellow. It's a nice "mellow yellow"

In our dining room is where the doorbell is.

As you can see, before it looked like this, very 70s. Which is fine, and I'm sure this is an antique I just ruined and I will probably regret it when I find out how much it was worth in good working condition, but it was ugly, especially with our updated wall. It just didn't look good. I wanted to take the whole thing off, but that looked like even more work that would probably end up doing something to the wiring of the house, so Angi told me I should just paint it.


I took down the box, and took out the fabric that smelled of the 70s (I don't know how to explain it, but that fabric just has a certain smell,) and said goodbye to the regal eagle.

I spray painted the box gray and cut out a piece of fabric using the old one as a pattern.

After the box dried I took some liquid nail, and glued the fabric back inside the box. There was a piece of screen that was behind the old fabric that I kept so the shape would hold.

We thought we could just take the pipes off and then spray paint them, but after we looked at them closer, we realized that we couldn't, and if we did take them off, we wouldn't be able to get them back on.

I figured I would find something later to paint the pipes with, but when I was at school one day, Angi beat me to it.

I like it so much better now, and it actually goes with the rest of the house. (We have gray trim throughout the house except the bathroom/bedroom).