The Little Things

Cue the high school flash-back moment where the above title reminds me of this song by Good Charlotte.

Now is one of those random moments where I wish I still had my pink leather studded bracelet. Sigh...it scares the crap out of me to think that the days of ball-bearing necklaces, studded bracelets, and pink Chuck Taylors were Ten Years Ago! I was a freshman in high school then. The 9-11 attacks had just happened. I was in the marching band. My eyebrows were severely over-plucked. Well, at least that's one thing I don't miss about being 14. Well...that and actually being 14.

Anyway: nostalgic moment over (as I fight the urge to cue up a Blink-182 playlist in iTunes...) The whole point of this post was to make a note of one tiny home improvement I've been able to easily make today. I love easy projects - they balance out the things like my painting/upholstering project that take multiple days (or sometimes weeks) or hanging all the curtains, which involved lots of drywall dust and playing with the electric drill. Nope: this project was simple, easy, and done so quickly, I had to undo part of it because I forgot to take pictures!

This shameful specimen is the weird corner cabinet in our bathroom.

I miss our old bathrooms. To start: there were two of them. And the bathtub in the main bathroom was wide enough to sit in without feeling like you might need to employ axle grease and a shoe-horn to get yourself out. Personally, I think that's the bare minimum as tubs go: in reality, one day I will settle for nothing less than a tub that comfortably seats two people. That, my friends, is living in style.

So, much as I love having some built-in storage, this cabinet would not have been my first choice when it came to said storage options. As bathroom storage goes, this cabinet is the cabinet that gets picked last in team dodgeball. It's the cabinet at the watering hole with the gimpy leg that's the first to get eaten when savage predators come. It's the cabinet all other cabinets studiously avoid during cabinet mating season. I think you get the picture I'm painting, here. And in case you don't, lucky you: I have another visual aid to demonstrate just what's wrong with it!

Yup. The handle is too small, and there's this odd peachy patch on the bottom of the door. Now, don't get me wrong: I don't mind the off-white hardware to match the off-white cabinet (even though the shiny-off-white paint could really use some TLC right about now...), but the cabinet door is magnetized so that it stays shut and doesn't swing open lying in wait to conk you on the head when you stand up from the toilet. A great feature, to be sure, but with the aforementioned tiny handle, you can't really get enough purchase to pull the door free of its magnetic bonds on the first try...and as it turned out, the Little Handle That Could eventually couldn't. After one too many attempts to get razors and wet-wipes out, the knob just popped off. I would have screwed it back on to the fitting and let that be that, but the cheap wooden handle had sheared off on the inside, leaving no thread to screw it back into place.

Oh darn. What a shame. Guess that means I have to go get a big enough knob for the cabinet door. Let's all take a moment to mourn. (Want me to lay on the sarcasm any thicker?)

After reading a few posts on Young House Love about updating things just by changing out the hardware (like I did here on my kitchen dresser!) I decided that at least as an intermediate step, the bathroom cabinet needed a little design-love. So it was off to B&Q again (soon they'll know me by name!) and a few minutes later I walked out with a lovely door knob that wasn't too big, but wasn't too small, and...came in a snazzy oil-rubbed bronze finish. (Yup, you guessed it...YHL moment.)

A beautiful contrast against the cabinet door! Oh, and to attack the creepy miscellaneous stain, I just got a cotton round with some nail polish remover on it and scrubbed at the door for a few minutes until it was clean enough for my satisfaction. I'd contemplated grabbing the leftover glossy white paint from when I refinished the chest, but
1) I'm sure the inventory says it's off-white, and I don't feel like painting it back later on unless I'm going to find a way to make it look super-swank in the meantime.
2) I can't remember what I did with the sandpaper anyway, so painting was off the table since I wouldn't be able to rough up the current crappy paint enough to give my new shiny paint something to stick to. Maybe eventually I'll do some navy blue stripes in a nautical theme. It depends on how much I feel like changing up this bathroom before we move.

And so, one door knob and some nail polish remover later, my creepy bathroom corner-cabinet was looking much better. (And feeling much easier to pry open!) And I love how the ORB knob looks against the off-white paint. The contrast brightens things up considerably.

Now to go make scones...because I'm bored and don't feel like begging around for a hot glue gun to borrow just yet.