Home Improvement

You learn a lot about a person after you buy their home. For instance, with the Ballard house, we learned that Ron should never be allowed to repair or build anything...ever. With our new house, we've learned a few things about the previous owners: they loved catalogs, they were extremely hard on the house (seriously, how do you manage to chip every toilet bowl in 8 years?!?), and they had a much higher tolerance for things than I do. Now, I understand how when you're selling your house, there's an attitude of "I sure hope the water heater lasts until after we sell" (which it did, but we had to replace it anyway), But there's a limit, in the 7 weeks that we've lived here, we've cleaned off the roof, re-done the phone system, repaired the furnace, replaced the "piece that makes it work" in the dishwasher, and this week we will be replacing the chirping thingy in the garage that will (hopefully) make the hot water stop trying to pound it's way through our bathroom wall.

Two weeks ago, we took on our first real home-improvement project. Real being defined as something we don't pay someone else to do. The kitchen cabinets, although beautiful, sleek, and modern, were also IMPOSSIBLE to open. I'm still nursing the blisters I have on the tips of my fingers from pressing as hard as I could on the edge of the drawer and pulling in the vain hopes of actually getting the drawer open. So, off we went to Home Depot to pick out some drawer pulls and knobs. After a not too horribly long time of hemming & hawing about which ones we should pick (with both of us thinking it really doesn't matter as long as they work and aren't too ugly, but unwilling to say it), we headed home with 12 knobs (we needed 13, but that's another story) and 5 drawer pulls.

Keith got to work drilling holes in all our beautiful cabinet drawers. We split the work so that Keith was drilling and I was screwing in the pieces (perhaps not an equal distribution of work, but who am I to complain?). As an engineer, Keith always does this sort of project in a very deliberate, exacting manner (which I appreciate), but that means that sometimes he can take forever (which I don't always appreciate). So, while I was waiting for him to drill a single hole, I installed this on the back of our pantry door:

I am SO excited to have a pantry and a place for everything. When we bought the house, it had a hanger similar to this inside the pantry, but on the door they'd hung one of those fabric shoe hangers. Now, shoe hangers really aren't all that good at hanging shoes, I can't imagine they're all that good at holding pantry items. So now I have twice as much storage in the pantry and a special place of honor for our "extra golden-" fish.

But back to the drawer pulls. Keith did a fantastic job, and it is so nice to be able to open the dish drawer now without ripping off a layer of skin and/or fingernail. Our next few projects will mostly involve paint (and eliminating polka-dots), but that can wait until after Thanksgiving.