Handling Issues

I’ve been deliberately withholding pictures of our kitchen as it slowly materializes, because I want to wait for it to be completely finished. But I’ll tease you a little bit with some details as it comes together.

One of the most unexpected things we encountered was the difficulty in purchasing cabinet and drawer handles. For one thing, there are HUNDREDS of different kinds of knobs and handles, and they’re all surprisingly expensive. IKEA carries a line of them of course, but the selection is limited, and they’re all very “Euro” in appearance. So we shopped mostly online, where we saw some exotic-looking glass knobs that were $63 each. EACH.

Another difficult aspect of buying cabinet and drawer handles is the fighting with your spouse over exactly what kind of handles to get. We need 37 of them for our kitchen, so cost was an issue. We eventually decided on two different styles of handle, one for drawers and one for cabinets. The drawer handles arrived first. Here’s one of them, installed:



IKEA makes a nice little template, enabling you to easily locate your drill holes to install the handles. Unfortunately, the template is in Metric, and the handles are in Inches. So I had to modify the template by drilling two new holes in it:





One major problem was that I had to mount two handles on the false drawer fronts on the sink cabinet. Because the sink is currently installed, there’s no room to use a screwdriver to tighten the bolts that hold the handle in place:



So I had to improvise by clamping a screwdriver bit in a pair of Vise-Grip pliers. Then I could get at the bolt heads, but I could only turn them a quarter-turn at a time. It took forever:





Until the cabinet handles arrive, we’ve been using little tabs made out of masking tape to open the cabinet doors. Cheap and effective, but I can’t wait to finish this job and be done with it.