I'm convinced the people who had this house built wanted a bigger house than they could really afford. It's obvious in the total lack of "upgrades" throughout. Some things are innocuous, such as the light fixtures (as we like to call it, "low-class brass") and the faucets look like they're from the 70s (even though this house was built in '99).
But there are other things that just scream low-cost & shabby: case in point, the kitchen cabinets. First and foremost, they don't even have hardware, so good luck figuring out which side opens the cabinet doors, or just try to open a drawer quickly trying to grab the underside lip. Lame. The builders also wasted a ton of space in the corners, which we're hoping to fix at some point.
Now don't get me wrong. In some places, you just can't get this stuff when you build a house, or it's not a big deal if you do because the other houses don't have this stuff either. But in Austin, especially in the suburbs, you can easily get this stuff for a few hundred dollars when the house is built, and almost every other house on the block has them. It's also not like they were stylishly left without the knobs and pulls -- they are very poorly built cabinets and not stylish at all.
Thankfully some of these things are more easily fixed than others. I'm not exactly handy. Andrea usually does the fixing up of things around the house, but she is otherwise indisposed for a while. So, I decided to take some of this time off and put knobs and pulls on the kitchen cabinets and drawers. Tom and Stepho upgraded all of the hardware on their kitchen cabinets a while ago, and they graciously gave us all of their old hardware. This was months ago, when we first got into the house, but needless to say, I'm slow about doing these sorts of things.
We bought a template for where to drill the holes in the cabinets and drawers. It was a little off, but I made it work to get the drawer holes marked. The cabinet doors were a little harder, so I ended up drilling a hole in the template to get it in the correct place on our cabinet doors (non standard, of course).
Andrea was taking a nap, and I wanted her to verify the location of the cabinet door knobs since the doors were somewhat odd in their shape. So, I decided to start wit the drawers. After drilling a couple of the drawers, I decided to try adding the hardware. That's when I ran into the first problem: the screws weren't long enough to go through the drawer fronts. It seems that the drawers were a composite of a box and a facade, and the screws that came with the hardware weren't long enough to go through. I looked around the house for anything that would work, but alas, we had nothing. A Home Depot trip was in my near future.
I decided to stop and charge the drill to get it ready for when Andrea awoke and I could at least start on the cabinet knobs. I did a bit of work (mostly just checking e-mail at this point) and Andrea woke up shortly thereafter. I checked with her on the cabinet knob spacing and drilled one of the cabinet knob holes and checked it to verify it worked and looked good. Then she helped me drill the hole in the plastic template. Finally, I could make some progress.
I drilled all of the cabinet door holes as well as almost all of the drawer holes. Then I needed to charge the drill again. The drill I was using isn't our best: a cordless 12V Black & Decker. I have a Craftsman 18V cordless drill, but since we went to London, both batteries were worthless when we came back. So, we bought another battery for it, and of course it doesn't fit properly into the charger. We've tried getting a new charger, but they don't sell them anywhere that we can find.
So, we haven't been able to charge the battery for fear of it getting stuck in the charger again. I found one of the old batteries and compared the markings to see what the problem was. There was a notch in the new battery, but it was in a different place than on the old battery, so I took our Dremel and notched out a new hole. Yay! Next project I'll actually be able to use the better drill. But for now, I was still using the old one since the battery wouldn't be charged for a while.
I finished putting all of the knobs on the cabinets and drilled the last of the drawers while Andrea fed Isaac, and then we went to Home Depot to get the longer screws. We took one of the screws we had so we could get the correct kind. They have this awesome screw checker (I should have taken a picture) that you can use to determine the size and threading. We found the screws with a little help from the Home Depot staff, and came back home after a quick stop at the store to pick up some more supplies. Isaac does a great job at the store.
Back home, I put the pulls on the drawers. Some of them were a little more difficult because the holes weren't drilled perfectly straight. If only the B&D drill had a level on it! Oh well. I ran into another snag when I got to our corner drawers. Once I had the pull on one of them, I couldn't pull the other one out! This proved to be a pretty big dilemma...especially since I had already drilled all the holes! We decided to deal with only one of the drawers being completely useful.
Overall, not a bad little project, and I'm just happy it's finally done. The cabinets look a ton better now.
