Small, Incremental Improvements

I have loathed and despised the knobs that came on our kitchen cabinets with a grim but abiding passion, pretty much since day one. The rust and ochre floral pattern gives me nasty flashbacks to the '70s. The drawer pulls were less awful, but too swoopy, and the brass coating was wearing down in spots and there was not much you could do to make them look less than grubby and dated. Since I don't believe in adding to landfills by ripping out perfectly functional original cabinets to replace them with glossy but shoddy new ones, even in a booming economy, replacing the cabinets in toto was not on the table. But the hardware is another story. Unfortunately, while I've looked around, nothing has really knocked my socks off. But then one of old drawer pulls came apart due to a stripped screw, and replacing the hardware got a bit urgent.

So last weekend, on a whim, we stopped in at the Lowe's in West Hill (about the farthest hardware store there is from us that's still in Kent) and there I finally found some new pulls I like. They're not perfect, really, but I've long since given up on perfect. They are definitely far less hideous than the original hardware, though. Annoyingly they're 'designer' hardware, so only Lowe's carry's them, as I found out when I went up to Home Despot to fill out the original purchase. On the other hand, they're better looking than the non-designer ones that are available at both, so there's that. Anyway, I bought a bunch of hardware and am slowly swapping out the old. What a relief.

( For pictures of old and new, click here )

Unfortunately, a lot of the old hardware was screwed down so tightly that it left indentations in the paint, making it all that much more urgent to sand and repaint the cabinets. I guess I'll be repainting the kitchen this spring.