#76- Getting a Handle on the Situation

It's been a little while since we've taken a peak at the Laundry Room, mostly because I'm still pretty crabby with Ikea that their wooden counter tops are still on back order.  I mean, who do they think they are?  The only store that sells solid wood counter tops for an incredibly low price?  Oh yeah.  So we wait.  And the room currently looks like this:

Please try to pretend that the electric blue counter tops, and the paint that I slapped all over them are not there.  Thanks much.

So until we can make some big changes with counter tops, accessories and maybe even a new rug and curtains, I thought I'd go with a little change that will hopefully go a long way- cabinet hardware.  I was suddenly inspired when I unpacked a box and found these handy little tools that we had purchased for our kitchen remodel in The Bungalow:

Now I know that you can make up a template on your own with cardboard or something, but we grabbed these little guys on an end cap for only $6 and they more than paid for themselves.  And now that we've moved into a hardware-phobic home, we can use these templates in the Kitchen, Laundry Room, built-ins the the Family Room and the crazy china cabinet in the Family Room that we hope to convert into a wine bar.  So I picked up a couple of simple, clean lined pulls from Ikea and went to work.

I momentarily freaked out that Ikea and those crazy Sweeds are on the metric system, until I realized that my handy little template was totally prepared for my European curve ball, and had one set of metric system spaced guides that fit my handles perfectly.  Score.  Or as the Europeans say, "Gooooooooooooal!"

 

All I had to do was mark the holes, drill a 3/8" hole, and attach the hardware.  In under 20 minutes I had this:

I was sort of underwhelmed by the before and after, until I scrolled back in my camera and compared it to this:

I think it goes a big way towards making this room feel more complete and finished.  I'm more eager than ever to finish up this room now, but it looks like I'm going to have to play by Ikea's time line on this one.  In the mean time I have, I have no shortage of other projects to get started on!