Renovation Adventure

Brushed nickel!

I’m not a gold kind of girl. So of course the house we bought came with gold fixtures galore (apparently I can’t take pictures anymore, blame it on today’s gloomy weather. You’ll have to trust me in the following pics when I say something is shiny gold that it is ugly shiny gold and when I say that it’s brushed nickel that it’s beautiful brushed nickel).

For example, here are the bathroom knobs & handles…

Not only is it gold, but the shape of the handles is awful too

…and the kitchen handles…

Yes, the grainy wood will be painted (eventually)

…and the kitchen faucet….

How often do you see a gold kitchen faucet?

There’s also the hall bath shower head & bathtub faucet, hardware + faucet in the red room bathroom, and the front door locks (actually we have 2 “main” doors, both with big gold shiny locks – I’ll rant about those another time) but I figured that’s enough pictures of ugly gold shiny things for now.

The good news is that we’ve started to replace the tacky gold, generally with brushed nickel. A few weeks ago we decided to replace the kitchen faucet. There was also a water filtration system installed, but the equipment took up half of the space under the sink. Since our tap water tastes fine and we could use the storage space, we yanked it out and installed a soap dispenser in the hole instead. We totally love it –makes it easier to wash dishes and gets the huge Costco-sized bottle off of the counter.

So this is our sink area now:

I ordered new cabinet hardware that arrived this week so today’s project was installing it all. I’m going to eventually paint the cabinets (future kitchen plans need their own post) so I’ll have to remove them again at some point. But have I mentioned how much I HATE shiny gold things in my house? Since future kitchen renovations will result in a huge cascade of projects, I don’t know when we’ll actually get to them. So I went ahead and installed the new hardware today, even though I’ll have to remove & reinstall it later, since I just couldn’t stand looking at the gold knowing that I had their replacements in my possession.

The picture looks gold, but trust me, it's nickel

I especially love the cup pulls we used for the drawers, which are typical for bungalow-style houses like ours. Most images I saw paired the cup pulls on drawers with simple round knobs on the cabinets. But since we already had 2 holes drilled in each cabinet from the previous handles, we went with simple handles instead to avoid having to fill in the extra hole. I’m really happy with the way they all look together. And they’ll look even better after the cabinets are painted.

The hall bath hardware went next

I swear these are nickel - will upload a better pic soon

Followed by the red room hardware. In this case, the bedroom already had a lighting fixture & switch plate in oil-rubbed bronze, which we liked. So we’re staying with that finish for the bathroom hardware.

Really need to replace the gold faucet here now

It’s amazing what a huge difference these things have made.