Kitchen Remodel: Handle Photos

The next step in our kitchen remodel was to update the cabinets by giving them a modern, ergonomic handle and matching hinges.

Here's a close up view of the old copper kitchen handles and hinges.  They were too small to put our fat 21^st century hands through.  Plus, the handles were so thin and sharp if I grabbed them the wrong way I gave myself metal “paper" cuts.  

For inspiration on what new handles to install, I let my own kitchen tell me what would work hardware-wise.  My Electrolux oven and its sturdy handle was just the look I wanted.   

At the home improvement store I found the perfect handle.  

I painted the kitchen cabinets with the turquoise-colored paint.  Mr. Wonderful installed the handles on them. Our friend, Grun, painted the "Coffee Cup" painting, which matches the cabinets perfectly!

And Voila!  Our kitchen remodel is one step closer to completion!

Next up:  To build an island… or Not?

Kitchen Redo: Step 3 Getting a Handle on It

“Can I help you?” said the smiling employee at the home improvement store.

“I’m looking for handles for my kitchen cabinets,” I said.  “Hey, do you like this one?” I asked pointing to a curvy one. 

“Uh—”

“Or this one?  Although it’s actually more of a knob.  People use knobs in their kitchens, don’t they?”

“Uh—”

“Or maybe I should get this adorable one with the apple design?   But maybe it’s too cutesy?  What do you think?”

“They’re paging me,” he said waving overhead to the speakers and ran away.  Unless his name was “Against All Odds by Phil Collins, the Muzak Version”, I was pretty sure he lied about being paged—just to get away from me. 

But I didn’t blame him. 

I was sitting on the floor of The Home Depot trying to decide which handles to buy for the kitchen cabinets.  I wanted the new hardware to be: 1) Clean; 2) Modern; and 3) More ergonomic, in other words easier for our fat hands to grab hold of.  Being blunt, our 21^st century hands were bigger than those in the 1950s.  In fact, if our old cabinet handles were anything to go by, the paws of all mid-20^th century people were downright Hobbitesque

I started my search for handles at The Home Depot so I could feel each one and be sure my fat digits could work them.  I grabbed every handle, knob, pull and grip thingy and quickly narrowed the field of acceptable handles to 47.  Maybe I could buy one of each of the 47 models and create a kitchen where every handle was unique.  Imagine the conversation starters!  Guests would come visit and I’d say, “I couldn’t decide which ergonomic handle to get so… I chose them all!”  “How clever,” guests would say testing each handle and pulling open all my cabinets.  Exposing all my Tupperware, plastic wrap and rubber bands—

No, I couldn’t invite lookey-loos to explore my kitchen and all its secrets.  Maybe ergonomic was less important than esthetic.  After all I’m a woman who still thought looks trumped comfort.

I raced home and poured over my file of inspiration kitchens.  I examined the White Kitchen, the Blue Kitchen and the Yellow.  The metal handles in the White Kitchen were mixed with well… white, which wouldn’t work in my blue kitchen.  Those in the Blue inspiration kitchen were gray metallic and would look good with grays and metals but not our turquoise paint.  The Yellow Kitchen had handles in a delicate scallop shell design that were beautiful and whispered of the ocean.  How great to live in Los Angeles’ land-locked Valley and be reminded of the ocean with every visit to the kitchen to refill the tortilla chip bowl.  I liked the shells. 

On closer inspection, the scalloped pulls were designed to shove your hand up under the shell and pull out.  This aggressive pull movement for me meant, sooner or later, chipped nail polish and jammed fingers.  I could see it now, guests would come visit and shriek “What happened to you?” upon seeing my bandaged hand.  I’d explain, “I was getting the popcorn bowl out of the kitchen cabinet, when I broke six fingers and chipped every nail.”

No, Clumsy Me couldn’t go with a handle that I couldn’t navigate well enough without going to the Emergency Room on a daily basis.  Perhaps esthetics weren’t that important after all.  But if looks and comfort didn’t matter to me, what did? 

Before embarking on the kitchen redo / kitchen remodel, Mr. Wonderful and I knew it was going to be a long-term project.  Not a 100-meter dash that was over in less than 10 seconds but a full-on 26.2 mile marathon through an alligator infested, mud-soaked bayou…  Followed by a second 26.2 mile marathon through the bone-dry,  hell-heated Mojave Desert.  Currently we were only at the first marathon’s three-mile marker and—already—I was raising the white flag in defeat.

But why?

Why was choosing kitchen cabinet handles so hard?  That day at work, I had wrangled two meetings, wrote three film synopses and answered every email in my inbox—oh, like 568 of them.   Now I sat surrounded by professional magazine clippings in total despair.  At the office I was the picture of efficient decision-making.  However with this kitchen handle decision I was a confused heap on the floor, literally.  What was my problem?  I mean, I was a college-educated, Masters degree-holding adult perfectly able to make—

Perfectly.  That’s it.  Or really, “perfect”.  Because of the time, money and enormous effort this kitchen remodel was costing us, I wanted our kitchen to be perfect.  However my desire for perfection was prohibiting me from making a simple decision.  Which isn’t to say I didn’t want to do perfect work at the office; or at least as-perfect-as-possible work at the office.  I contemplated my dilemma and teased out the differences.  At work I knew the parameters of my job.  I knew what type of synopsis to write since I knew the milieu, the company culture and the client.  I knew what kind of emails to write because I could tailor each one to the original writer of the email.  What I needed to do in my kitchen was to forget the inspiration kitchens, forget all The Home Depot options and just look.  At.  My Kitchen. 

I realized with a jolt that the answer to the handle question was before me: here in my kitchen’s milieu.  Yes!  The answer I wanted was discernable in the method and personal culture of how I used my kitchen.  I looked at the room, at the sink, the refrigerator and the gas oven.  I loved cooking and baking with our new Electrolux gas oven.  I appreciated the solid temperature knobs that my fat hands could easily grab.  I admired the oven’s straight-forward, sturdy handle that I could pull open with my bare hands or with oven mitts.  Actually the oven’s handle was… perfect!  A perfect handle for the oven, for all our kitchen cabinets and for me. 

At the home improvement store I found metal hardware handles that mimicked our oven’s sturdy handle.  I bought them all.  And I decided: they are perfectly me. 

So long Mile Three of the marathon.  Bring on Mile Four!

Kitchen Redo Ideas

“I can’t wait to redo this kitchen,” I said eying the room over my morning tea.

“Yes,” Mr. Wonderful said buttering his toast.

“And get rid of this faded blue-green paint.”

“Yes.”

“And the ugly copper handles.”

He nodded.  “By the way, what do you want to replace them with?”

“Oh…” I sucked in my breath.  “I have no idea.”

Leave it to Mr. Wonderful to teach me something new.  Again. 

Lesson 1: The easiest part of redoing a kitchen is deciding to: Redo the kitchen.  The hardest part is: Planning the new one. 

This is our house,” he said.  “We can do whatever we want to the kitchen: put in an island, swap the sink with the oven’s position, rip out walls—”

Suddenly with all these new, limitless possibilities I started to feel less confident about this remodel.  What should go in a kitchen?  What should go in my new kitchen?  Of course I needed the basic appliances but did I also want an island?  A wine refrigerator?  A double oven?  What type of kitchen should we install in its place—Country French, Minimalist Cube, Mid Century Modern. Retro-Metro?  I hadn’t a clue.

I needed ideas.  I needed inspiration.  When the mountain doesn’t come to moi, moi goes to the mountain.  At my computer I went to Google and typed in “kitchen remodel”.  In .004 seconds I got over 15 million results.  I scanned the first 57 screen pages.  Then right when my left eye was crossing my right eye from screen fatigue, much like the transit of Venus, I clicked my browser closed.  I hadn’t gone to the mountain of ideas, I’d gone to their universe.  I was overwhelmed.  If I wanted to make any headway, I needed to narrow the idea field.   

I drove to Ikea.  I got my modular Swedish on and meandered through the maze of display rooms.  I looked at every single enkdorp, luftig, akurum room and loved over half of them.  Which meant now I was more lost than when I’d entered the blue and yellow box store the size of eighty-two football fields.  Ikea still had too many trygg and jokkmokk choices that I had to leave the store immediately or risk having my brain go bjursta.  Somehow I escaped while still managing to buy $100 worth of un-kitchen items.  I scratched my head.  How did Ikea get you to buy when you didn’t even know what you wanted?  Clearly what I needed was someone to speak my language.

 

I went to the bookstore and snatched up a stack of kitchen redo magazines as well as the house porn magazines like Traditional Home, Metropolitan Home and Farm and Home, basically I bought anything with “home”, “shelter” or “cave” in the title.  Then I ripped out the pages I liked.  I ripped out Southern, suburban, urban and Amish Country House styles, of which the latter is actually an oxymoron since Amish houses are always in the “country”.  The question remained: what kitchen style was I—and “Scattered” didn’t count.

The tearing sound of slick magazine paper triggered a memory in my brain.  I’d been tearing up magazines... for years.  At home I went to my filing cabinet and dug out a hanging file two inches thick.  Inside were page after page of magazine, newspaper and advertisement clippings of living rooms, bathrooms and—lo and behold—kitchens (!) that I’d seen and liked during the years that we’d rented and I’d longed to buy a house.  Obviously I liked these clippings enough to keep them when we’d moved.  These clippings were the ideas I needed to remind myself who I was, what kitchen style I liked and what I wanted in a kitchen. 

I made a cup of tea and started paging through the file’s clippings.  I felt strongly that my kitchen was among these pages.  Turning the pages, I knew I’d find it.  In the meantime I got to re-live my dreams of kitchens.  These were just the ideas I’d wanted; the ones I'd already had. 

Old Blue Kitchen

A blue color by any other name would be as attractive.  Or would it?  

Here are photos of our kitchen BEFORE the redo.  The copper hinges and drawer pulls are original and very Betty Draper's kitchen a la 1950s.  I love the throwback style of Mad Men but those hinges and pulls have to go.

Notice the green paint appearing beneath the blue.

Also notice this country kitchen’s wavy flourish to the cabinets.  I love the solid wood cabinets but that wavy line.  Not at all.

It's exciting to think about what we can keep, what we can replace and what we'll buy new.  

Kitchen redo--bring it!

Kitchen Opinions

Ah!  Saturday morning!  Mr. Wonderful was called into the studio for finishing touches on a commercial so I had a whole day to work on the house without any distractions.  I made myself an espresso, opened the kitchen doors to the springtime air and started taking pictures of the space because the time had come—to Redo.  The.  Kitchen.

We had bought the house fully aware that the kitchen would have to be redone because 1) It looked dated; 2) It didn’t have any appliances; and 3) It was painted blue.  We both thought blue belonged in a bathroom, not a kitchen.  In addition this blue was not an attractive blue but a ratty, two-tone, faded shade with blotches of green randomly appearing amid the blue as if the previous owners had run out of paint before finishing the job.

 

“Who would paint a kitchen this or any other blue?” Mr. Wonderful had said just that morning over breakfast. 

“Colorblind people,” I said.

In addition the wooden cabinets were trimmed with a wavy flourish that softened their line in an old-fashioned, Hee-Haw, country kitchen kind of way, especially if “country” were spelled with a  “k”.  Further, the cupboards’ copper handles and hinges looked like those found in Betty Draper’s knotty pine kitchen in Mad Men, which only added to the dated, run-down, country feel of ours.

“You’re not ripping out the kitchen, are you?” our nosy neighbor said peering inside the open door from his side of the fence.

“We’re going to redo it, Harold.”

“Just so you know, the wooden cabinets are real.”

“They feel solid.”

“The wood paneling on the walls is real, too.”

“It feels solid.”

“My in-laws had them all custom-made specifically for the house.”

“The kitchen hasn’t been updated since 1953?”

“Except for the ugly blue paint.  That was added later.  Hey!” he said as if an electrical current had just struck him.  “I think it’d be nice if you returned the kitchen to the way it used to be—sand down the paint to get to the plain brown wood.”

It wasn’t surprising that Harold had an opinion about our kitchen—after all the house used to belong to his in-laws and solid wood cabinets were appealing—but I wasn’t going to change it back to the way it was.  I couldn’t tell him face-to-face there way no way I’d sand down five coats of paint to reveal wood paneling on the walls.  Wood paneling was not my thing and luckily Mr. Wonderful agreed with me.

Instead I said, “Thanks for letting me know how it used to be, Harold,” and politely half closed the door to photograph behind it.

“Morning, neighbor!” a cheery feminine voice said while knocking on the half-closed door, which in turn bonked my head. 

“Hi, Mary,” I said rubbing my crown as she bounded into our kitchen wearing her sneakers and looking around like a kid in a candy store.

“I really like your kitchen.”

“You’re the second neighbor who does,” I said.

“I like it because it reminds me of the summer cabin in the mountains that we went when I was a girl,” Mary said with a far way look in her eye.  “It was old, musty and oh, so country.”

Old, musty, country kitchens were not my thing and luckily Mr. Wonderful agreed with me.

“I wouldn’t change a thing in your kitchen,” Mary said.  “Except the terrible blue paint.  I’d cover that immediately.  Speaking of I have to pick up my daughter’s green paint at the store.  Imagine, we’ll both be painting rooms at the same time!”  She kissed my cheek and bounded outside as quickly as she’d arrived.

It’s not surprising that Mary had an opinion about our kitchen.  After all she did the cooking in their home so she was entitled to an opinion about what worked and what didn’t in a kitchen.  But I couldn’t tell her face-to-face that I didn’t want to keep the old, musty, country flair of this kitchen, as appealing as it may have been in her cabin.

“What’s all the noise?” Matt said shuffling into the kitchen at 11 AM.  My cousin’s kid liked his sleep.

“The neighbors like our kitchen but not the blue,” I said turning on the hot water pot for his tea.

“’Cause this blue is ugly,” he said reaching for some bread and cheese still on the table.

“You don’t like blue either.”

“Blue’s cool but not in a kitchen,” he said with a yawn.  “BT dubs, when are you gutting the whole kitchen for the redo?  And do I need to find a new place to stay?”

It wasn’t surprising that Matt had an opinion about our kitchen, because he was a twenty-three year-old college graduate and twenty-three year-old college grads always had opinions, which they shared... liberally. 

But why did I have to listen to everyone else’s opinion?  It was my kitchen, shouldn’t they listen to my opinions about it?

For example how about my opinion that I agreed with Matt, Mary, Harold and Mr. Wonderful: this two-tone blue was ugly.

Or my opinion that I liked how the cabinets were made of solid wood.  So why would I rip out the wooden cabinets just to replace them with new pressed-wood or plastic ones?

Or my opinion that a kitchen redo is not about gutting everything for a brand new, cookie-cutter kitchen that’ll look just like the neighbor’s.  I liked our 1950s house and wanted to keep some elements from the 1950s in it.   Otherwise—Hello?—I would have bought a brand new house. 

Or my opinion that living in this house now meant retaining the best style of the mid 20^th century paired with the latest, most efficient 21^st century appliances.

Or my opinion that when I moved into this house, I held a theory that blue belonged in the bathroom not the kitchen.  But then a funny thing had happened while we’d been living in this house, cooking in this kitchen and eating in this space.  I fell in love with the reality of a blue kitchen. 

Several hours later Mr. Wonderful returned home.  I told him my new opinions about fixing up the kitchen and repainting it blue.

“Blue?!  But 12 hours ago you hated the blue, too.”

“True,” I said but opinions can change when he left me alone on a Saturday morning without any distractions.  Especially when he left me alone on a Saturday morning without any distractions.