Upgrading Builder Grade Items

When Avery came home, my stepdad flew with her. That brave soul. Thank goodness for direct flights, eh?

We were giving him a tour of the house when he got here and I started mentioning things that I wanted to do/change/upgrade and he pretty much decided to take lead on that while he was here visiting for a week.

First, we got some hardware for the kitchen cabinets. I cannot say how much I have been bugging Troy to do this. I probably said something about it once a week for 6 months. I think that could fall in the nagging category...

Here is what they looked like before:

They're pretty and all, but just looked super unfinished. And my baking cabinet always had flour/oil/greasiness on the door from grabbing the edge of door rather some hardware.

Troy and I headed to Lowe's to pick some out and settled on some brushed silver handles. We picked out another set initially, but when they told us they'd have to special order them because we needed 45 of them, we were like "um, well what do you have in stock?" The special order would take 9-10 days and my stepdad was not going to stay that long to give us a good kick in the rear and get it done. So we picked something that we could take home that day.

SO MUCH BETTER! The kitchen feels SO much more finished and after having them in for 2 weeks, I don't know how we lived without them for almost a year. Seriously, it changed my life. So much less cleaning and wiping down of cabinets. Those dark cabinets would leave wicked handprints on them. With the brushed metal, you don't see any fingerprints. YES.

They made an easy, breezy template for installation and to do all 45 handles, and it only took about an hour.

The other big upgrade made was the light fixture in our downstairs full bathroom. It was seriously gross because I always wanted to dust the bulbs. You could see every speck of dust on them. I have hated it since we moved in. I don't like the exposed lightbulbs and hope to upgrade the other 2 bathrooms very soon. It makes the room feel so much more homey and nice.

I didn't take a picture of the actual fixture, but here's the picture of the twin in Avery's bathroom upstairs. It makes me cringe. Seriously.

I LOVE the new one. It was designed where you pick out the globes that you want for the fixture. We already had extra globes in our garage from another project (the chandelier in the dining room) so we saved money there :)