Small, Incremental Improvements

[akirlu]

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.



Old cabinet knob:



Old drawer pull:



New cabinet knobs:



New drawer pulls:





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.

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Oh, much nicer.

[fredcritter.livejournal.com]

What she said

[profgeek.livejournal.com]

Definitely much nicer. Simple and elegant, nothing better than that.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

Totally justified.

[mallory-blog.livejournal.com]

a cleaner look - still pretty conservative...

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

It's impressive how big the effect is in the room. It will be even better when I get a strong, clear color on the cabinet doors.

[jry.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on finding something you like! We've been in our house for almost 10 years and still haven't found pulls we like well enough to replace the ones we dislike (though admittedly, ours are not quite as ugly as yours were. Ick.)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I dunno if I would have called them conservative -- possibly because I can't think what the wacky, psychedelic paisley equivalent would be in cabinet hardware.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

As with our bathroom, having something actively broken seems to have been the trigger to finally getting new hardware in the kitchen. In fact, I'm not entirely content with the new hardware in the bath, but I'm sure it will be there for years to come, because it isn't actively bad, and it works.

[prettymuchpeggy.livejournal.com]

I am sure the others have their place, but I agree they should not be in any kitchen.