Monday, August 4, 2014

Quick update

The title of this post has two meanings: the post itself is just a quick update, and its purpose is to tell you about a quick update in our kitchen. Specifically, to our kitchen cabinets.

As I mentioned last week, our attempt to upgrade our dingy kitchen cabinet handles with oil-rubbed bronze (ORB) spray paint wasn't very successful. So I took the plunge and ordered some new ones, which arrived last weekend. And as I hoped, installing them was a pretty simple job; a couple of the screws on the existing hardware required some coaxing to come loose, but for the most part, it was just two screws out, two screws in, boom. The whole process took maybe an hour. As a result, our kitchen cabinets have gone from looking like this...


...to looking like this.


Now, that may not look like a very dramatic transformation, so let's pull in for an extreme close-up of just what the old handles used to look like. Pretty grungy, right? You can definitely see the base metal under the copper plating, and even the copper parts don't make a very good contrast with the dark wood of the cabinet doors.


The new handles, by comparison, are not only in better shape, they also have a much darker finish that stands out better against the wood. And the nifty basket-weave design in the metal somehow seems to tie in with a whole lot of other pieces in our house that I'd never thought to connect before, from the decorative metalwork in these lamp bases...


to the Celtic knotwork in this tapestry...


...and even some other art pieces that aren't visually similar, but just have a Renaissance theme.


So, with an investment of $45 (which we didn't even pay out of pocket, thanks to survey reward points) and an hour of work, not only does our kitchen look much more elegant, but the whole house feels just a little more pulled-together. And we still have two extra handles left from the package of 25, in case we damage one or take a notion to install one on something else.

Now, I guess, all that remains is to dispose of the old ones. They're in such cruddy shape that I'm not confident anyone on Freecycle will want them...but I guess it can't hurt to try.

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