Kitchen Upgrades

I’ve decided that my next house project will be putting hardware on our kitchen cabinets so last night before meeting some friends for dinner, Jose and I stopped by Lowe’s to check out some options. This should be a pretty easy project — the hardware isn’t too expensive, it can be done in a day or two, and I think it will really make our kitchen look nicer. The only big decision was whether we want to use knobs or pulls on the cabinet doors. (We definitely want pulls on the drawers.) After wandering through the kitchen section to get some ideas, we decided to go with pulls on everything and bought a couple of them to take home and make sure they looked nice.

It was at that point that I discovered a problem. Well, not a problem per say, but definitely an annoyance. Our kitchen cabinets are the standard ones that came included with the house, i.e. we chose not to pay the builder for upgraded cabinets. (The cabinets are actually the only thing in the kitchen we didn’t upgrade.) While they’re perfectly nice, the construction is not super high quality. Case in point: the drawers. The drawers are actually made of some kind of cheap wood (it may actually be fake wood) with a stained wood facade. But the facade is not integrated into the structure of the drawer itself — it’s just screwed on to the front.

Therefore, there are TWO layers of wood between the outside of the drawer and the inside. I never noticed this until last night, and it wouldn’t be a big deal — except that the screws included with the drawer pulls are not long enough to fit through both layers of wood. So we have to 1) drill through twice as much stuff and 2) buy longer screws for the drawers. Fortunately screws aren’t very expensive, and this is only a problem on the drawers. (The cabinet doors are a single piece of wood.) Still, I’m glad we realized this before I started drilling!

Here’s a good “before” photo. (Excuse the mess!) We probably won’t finish the project this weekend since tonight and tomorrow will be full of half marathon activities, but I’ll make sure to post a photo when it’s done.