Cabinet Hardware

Once upon a time, our kitchen cabinets looked like this:

(And just because I came across these pictures while looking for a "before" photo, I have to include them. As... close up photos. Okay, really - just look at that tiny girl of mine! I'm dying over how sweet she is.)

And this video? Oh my goodness! Be still my heart. It's a good thing I have a newborn or else this right here would have sent me over the edge with baby-hungriness. It makes me so excited for Austin to hit this age!

 Note the lack of hardware on the cabinets in the background?

We loved our kitchen very much, but always talked about wanting to add hardware to the cabinets. We would have probably just had the builders install hardware except for the fact that they were going to charge obscene amounts of money to do it. (I think it was like $8/knob and $12/handle.) We figured that it would be worth it to install it ourselves and save the money that the builder would have charged us. We would occasionally look at hardware to decide on what we liked, but we never found anything that was just "perfect" - and I always choked a little bit on actually spending the money to buy the hardware. ($2-$4 per knob still adds up pretty quickly!) Finally, after over two years of living in our home - we decided that we just needed to do it - and so we did! 

We found some hardware that we liked while browsing at Target and we decided that it was time. The fact that Target was having a "spend $50 - save $10" on Home items definitely helped push us over the edge. I was actually very pregnant - but we knew that it would just be more complicated for us to install after we had our baby, so we bought all the hardware we thought we needed and got really excited for our big project. 

When we got home, we started holding up the knobs trying to decide where we wanted to place them on our upper cabinets. I was trying to make a case for putting them slightly higher than exactly centered in the corner and said something about upgrading to handles at a later time, so David held up one of the drawer handles. We both immediately saw how much better it looked, and as David quickly took it down we looked at each other with wide eyes. A couple of trips to several different Targets later and we had exchanged enough of our little knobs for actual handles for the upper cabinets. We also read a couple of articles online about mixing and matching cabinet hardware, and kind of fell in love with the idea of putting cup pulls on all of the top drawers in our lower cabinets. Target doesn't carry bronze cup pulls, which led us to ordering some from an online cabinet hardware retailer. We were excited until we held them up against our cabinets and then we fell a little out-of-love with the cup pull idea. A flat-rate shipping fee, plus a 15% restocking fee, and we were back to using the same pulls on the upper cabinets and the drawers, with the knobs on the lower cabinets.)

On Labor Day, we woke up and got right to work! I marked where we wanted the hardware to go and David was the master driller. We took our jobs seriously after watching an HGTV episode of Property Brothers where one of the homes had horribly off-centered hardware. Rulers, measuring tapes, and levels were all used to make sure that the hardware lined up perfectly.  

We were super proud of ourselves when we finished all of our cabinet doors. They looked awesome, and we basically considered ourselves professionals. Then we started on the drawers.

First we realized that the screws that came with the hardware weren't actually long enough to fit on our drawers due to an extra piece of wood on the inside. We were able to resolve that issue with a quick trip to the hardware store.

But then, we realized that the inner piece of wood was actually a fairly weak piece of particle board and when drilled through, it cracked and splintered all over the back. We finally finagled a way to solve that problem with a spare piece of 4x4 wood and the empty hardware boxes. I would hold the wood in place while David drilled through. The solid wood behind the particle board helped it not to splinter so badly.

We were super proud of ourselves for our ingenuity and handyman skills!

And, the end result! 

We are so pleased with the way that they turned out and pretty much feel like we are pros. It's so nice to have a big check mark off next to this item that has been waiting for so long. Next up: a tile backsplash for our kitchen. Oh yeah. It's happening. #welovehgtv #wecandoanything #right?