Doorbell Cover #1 - Project Design

I find project ideas in many different places.  Woodworking magazines and books are a great place to find project plans, I've got stacks of old ones in my workshop and the library has a good supply as well.  There are a couple of TV shows worth watching, such as New Yankee Workshop and Rough Cut.  However, most of my ideas come from the Internet.  I usually 'Google' around until I find something I like, then reproduce it in Sketchup before cutting wood.

I've been doing some painting in our house and one of the walls I painted had the doorbell that came with the house.  It was an ugly mirrored abomination that matched the rest of the decor that the house had when we moved in.  Since then we've gotten rid of just about all of the mirrored doors, the mirror fireplace and glass block wall, but this doorbell was still around.  Since I had to pull it down to paint the wall it was a good time to replace it.  Since I have a workshop full of tools, this would be a nice easy project to get back into woodworking after a long break.

But first, I needed a plan.  First, I Googled around for various doorbell covers, eventually settling on 'Craftsman Doorbell Cover' as my search :



I didn't find exactly what I wanted, but this image brought me to a Pinterest page full of doorbell covers and that's where I hit the jackpot.



The cover in the bottom right corner is my favourite, and after getting approval from my wife I was ready to go.

The website for the doorbell cover had a few more pictures of the doorbell.  I imported the front-on image into Sketchup and traced it to make my plan.  The existing doorbell could not be used, but I picked up an inexpensive doorbell from Home Depot and dismantled it to get the chime mechanism.  I measured that and sized the cover to match.  Here's what I ended up with :



For larger projects I'll make a full 3D model, going as far as to create all the joinery as well.  For this simple project I just made up this simple 2D image, and built from it.