0 Boomerang Throwback Kitchen Hardware

This series of home posts are events which occurred in the distant past, please bear with me until I catch up to the present.

Next on the kitchen agenda was Kitchen Cabinet Hardware. We decided to reuse the hardware available to us.

The decision was made based on the following:

Most of the drawer pulls we glanced at started around $2 each, and since we had 24 pulls we weren’t ready to fork over $50 when we plan to completely gut the kitchen someday.

This left us with cleaning the old hardware. And by dirty I mean years of cigarette residue and food grease. I simply parked my tush in the kitchen with some gloves, paper towel, and my savior cleaning product: Windex. A little scrubbing and buffing and those suckers looked like new:

Personally I really like the chrome on white look and the fact that they were free, minus some tedious cleaning and buffing. It’s probably the right amount of vintage for the modern/vintage look we’re going for.

Oh and after some research (here if anyone is interested or more on ebay) these things can fetch $8.10 each on sale, maybe they’re back in style? Their style name is ‘Boomerang.’ I think the name seals the deal on true love.

To be honest at first I thought they looked a little too 50’s & 60’s and too ‘chrome-ish’ but after cleaning, they really worked. I’m also in love with the v shape which reminds me of vintage cars.

Source

 Jetsons for some reason.

Source

Maybe it’s those popped collars in the shape of a v.

Of course they didn’t match the brushed nickel elsewhere in the house but it’s not as stark as ORB vs. shiny chrome.

And here they are in all their glory:

As for the hinges, we also opted to keep them. Since I spent so much time painting and cleaning the old hardware, it didn’t leave time to clean the hinges. We did buy new screws because the old ones were stripped during removal.

I mean the ‘gold’ dirt really isn’t entirely notable unless you get all up close and personal.

Since we painted over all the holes and painted the cabinets in general, we had to move the hinge holes slightly to accommodate for the extra gap from the coats of paint. We also wanted to leave room for expansion and contraction (summer humidity expansion vs winter dry contraction). Right next to lake Michigan in Wisconsin, we have very opposite climates during winter and summer where humidity is almost extreme and the winter dry spells are prominent.

So this installation method may need adjusting depending on your weather patterns. Also, a two person effort to drill new holes is recommended; one to hold the cabinet into position and the other to drill. My apologies for lack of pictures since both our hands were tied.

But basically for longer doors like ours, you drill the top hinge first (indicated #1) then drill the top of the second door (#2) with a little gap so the paint doesn’t chip away for the previous humidity vs dry air.

Then, finish by making small adjustments to the bottom for proper clearance. We verified the clearance by having one of us hold the door at the hinge (#3 or #4) while the other opened and closed. We happen to install ours in the spring before the humid summer so we didn’t account properly which caused a few problems. They were simple adjustments to remove and re-drill. So learn from our mistake and over compensate if in doubt.

Want to follow along with the Kitchen progression? Here’s the Prepping for paint, Painting Part 1, Repairing Drywall, and Painting Part 2.