Holey walls Batman! Ding-donging extra doorbell!

My home-office is in our basement. We only have one doorbell, very near the front door where it can be heard fairly well throughout the whole house, except maybe in the outer reaches of the basement. Thus, I miss the doorbell if someone ever comes over, which is a problem if no-one else is home at the time.

So, I resolved to put an additional doorbell in the basement close to my office. I thought I already had a doorbell, which was the main reason I wanted to put one in, but I may have given it away when we moved. So, I went and bought a cheap $7.00 doorbell at The Home Depot.

I searched all over in the basement for where the transformer may be hidden for the doorbell, but I think the previous owner covered it up with sheetrock and paint. (If I had finished the basement, I would have pre-ran the wires for a second doorbell and various other things.) I took off the cover of our chime-box and hooked up my new doorbell in parallel with the existing doorbell. I tried the front and back bells, and they both chime on both chime-boxes, so the transformer must be powerful enough.

Now the trick is to run the wires through the wall down to the location of the second chime box. I have an advantage and disadvantage built into one with the existing chime box being on the wall next to our stairs. Since the basement stairs have a door under them with unfinished walls inside of it, it will be easy for me to run the wire from where the wires come down from above to the wall location where I want to put the new chime box. This might be easier though because the stairs also require more boards to be in the walls right there, which means I have to drill holes through the boards to put the wires through.

In order to drill holes through the boards, I'll need to drill or cut access holes in the sheetrock walls. That means 3 - 4 holes. Luckily I already have spackel, wire mesh and the right paint to patch the holes. It is still a bit of guess work though to figure out where all the holes should go. I've been knocking on walls and measuring rather than using a studfinder. That is a bit tricky when you are going down stairs.

I may ask my dad to come help me out.