kitchen update part III

Today's post is about hardware. As you can see in the photo below, our original kitchen cabinet hardware was spiffy. 

And by spiffy, I mean, 70's.

You can also see that fabulous radio/CD player that was stashed under the window cabinets. 

So after a couple of coats of paint and primer, our cabinets took on this look:

And to paint those cabinets (see more on that here), we had to remove every screw, latch, and pull. Here's a small collection, just to give you an idea:

From piles such as this, I identified 4 different sizes of screw:

and sorted them into manageable piles for later work:

We considered repainting the existing hardware, but nixed that idea in a jiffy. We were willing to paint the hinges (it took me 7 minutes to remember just now what they're called) rather than spend money on them---after all, this is our experiment/transition kitchen until we can afford to redo the entire thing (a.k.a., pipe dream).

First, I laid out half of the hinges on one of our extra Crate & Barrel boxes:

We sprayed with this primer, in white, because we figured with all the use they'll get, we wanted that paint to stick "good":

Which created this effect after one coat:

We applied two light dustings to get the desired effect.

Then, we applied a metallic spray paint to get that "older, but still sharp" look that works with a more cottage style, in black.

The after effect:

You'll notice at the bottom of the photo, there are strips instead of hinges. We knew we wanted to leave some of the cabinets open, and the shelving involved metal adjustment strips. We didn't want them to be visible, so we painted the suckers.

We chose to paint all hardware the same, which I mention just in case anyone thinks we're amatuerish enough to paint the white cabinet hinges white and the black cabinet hinges black.

More later this afternoon!

icj,

~j

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