[miamicanes]

As part of my kitchen's initial makeover (it's all going bye-bye in about 2-3 years, but I decided to spend a few hundred now to make it at least tolerable and non-embarrassing), I bought 5 red Grundtal undercabinet lights and 17 packs of 6/10" Lansa handles. I'm really happy with the way the lights came out (the red amidst what would otherwise be a relentless sea of fake knotty pine melamine makes a night-and-day difference), but I'm just not feeling the love for the Lansa handles.

Last night, I mounted a pair on a wall cabinet using a single screw (to minimize the evidence if necessary), and taped a few in place on a base cabinet. I'm not really impressed with the outcome, especially on the narrow drawer that's about an inch wider than the handle itself. The result is in the photos below. At best, I'm feeling like they don't make matters worse. At worst, I'm feeling like they look totally out of place, scale, and context. Oh, and the fact that the doors don't have much vertical "wiggle room" with regard to their hinge screws, none of them are perfectly matched height-wise, and the size of the Lansa handles seems to draw attention to it and make it even more apparent.

Does anybody disagree? Please, feel free to be brutally honest... my own design skills aren't exactly top-notch, and I know it ;-)

Ironically, I'm feeling like I might have liked them more if I hadn't put up the lights yet, but now that the lights are there, I kind of feel like the handles are competing with the lights for visual dominance, winning, and their victory isn't necessarily for the better.

Opinions? Does anyone feel like the Lansa handles genuinely enhance the kitchen's appearance? Am I just jaded because adding the lights and hacking the snackbar made such a HUGE improvement, and I'm just not feeling happy about the handles because they're only a tiny improvement?

Right now, I'm basically seeing two viable options:

a) Put the rest up and hope they look better as a whole than the isolated examples I'm looking at right now.

b) Take them back, and try to fill in the holes in the wall cabinet door. I'm open to suggestions for what to fill the holes with. I know they'll never be invisible, but I was hoping there might be something that could make them look like little dark circles without smearing and staining the surrounding area. The woodgrain pattern is so busy, from a distance they'd probably look like little knots.

By the way, if anyone's wondering, the snackbar USED to be table-height. On Sunday, I built a new platform with 3/4" plywood, cantilevered it from the island with slanted Capita legs, then put the old snackbar on top of the new plywood platform (cut to fit perfectly inside a cavity on the snackbar's underside) and screwed & glued them together. I'm absolutely DELIGHTED with the way THAT came out

[Dyan]

wow, what an interesting kitchen. I like the look of the lansas on the top cabs a lot. what about only using them on doors and finding coordinating knobs for the drawers? I wouldn't worry too much about it making the doors looks more uneven, that kind of 'is what it is' and the handles will draw attention away, I think...

good luck...

[DesignDiva]

There is a LOT of verticality going on with that grain...I don't think the Lansa enhances it, I think it competes. And, in that corner you won't be able to open the drawer with Lansas on both adjacent drawers.

It's a tough choice for handles, because of the overwhelming pattern of the grain. I'd tend to go for something small, dark and round rather than linear and light colored. Just enough to punctuate and stand out.

You can use a colored wood putty...it will certainly blend in. I've been known to use a fine point sharpie to mimic grain lines through a wood putty patch, that's probably all you would really need to make it completely invisible.

[DesignDiva]

You know, I really like the grain of the cabinets...it's the backsplash that I really think ought to go! Is it removable, or paintable, or coverable? That would make a huge difference.

[miamicanes]

I've thought about trying to find out how much it would cost to get someone to relaminate the backsplash and countertop with new Formica that kind of looks like black granite. In theory, it would be an easy & straightforward job for them, because the backsplash and counter are one continuously-glued piece of Formica (sharp curve at point where it becomes the vertical backsplash, gentler curve at the front). The only complication (probably easy) would be cutting/shaving/sanding the original diagonal corner seam to make it flat again (over the years, it soaked up water and expanded, like just about all particleboard + formica seams do eventually).

The big question is whether it would be cheap enough to do as a "throw-away" job... do it now, knowing fully well I'm going to trash the entire kitchen and rebuild it with Adel Birch and black granite in ~3 years. For $200 or so, I'd probably go for it. $300, probably not. Anyone have any idea how much cash I'm likely to be looking at? There's basically 5 sections to relaminate:
* 15" wide section over base cabinet between refrigerator and stove
* 3'6" wide section (measured at widest point, with 45 degree corner seam)
* 9'11" wide section (ditto)
* 54" wide section over island
* 49" wide section (~15" deep) over bar.

Come to think of it, if I really COULD get it done for ~$250 (remember, I'm just speculating how much it might cost at this point), and took back the unopened 15 packs of handles, I'd only be ~$125 or so away from the estimated relamination cost... Hmmm... 2 weeks ago, I would have considered it to be a no-brainer in favor of the relamination. But now that I have the red lights breaking up the sea of fake knotty pine, I'm not quite sure, because it actually kind of looks halfway decent now (obviously not where I want it to ultimately be, but several orders of magnitude better than it looked last week).

By the way, if anyone's wondering, my cabinets are VERY typical of higher-end builder's grade cabinets found in mid-priced condos and townhomes built in the early 80s in Miami-Ft. Lauderdale. I've personally lived in 3 places (a rented condo, an apartment, and my current house) that ALL had almost EXACTLY the same cabinets, verbatim. The only different one was the condo I rented while in college... same cabinets, but the countertop had a rectangular front instead of curved one, and the front band of formica was deep red. In fact, that's what gave me the "red" inspiration THIS time... I remembered that red and the fake woodgrain actually looked pretty nice together

I'm not really sure about the viability of redoing ONLY the countertop OR backsplash, because like I mentioned, there isn't really any border between them. I'm guessing that the builder had the bare particleboard cabinets and sub-countertop(?) installed, then had the cabinet company come out and do the final lamination on-site. In Fort Lauderdale, especially, there used to be (and might even STILL be) a TON of mom & pop companies that built kitchen cabinets and wall units, then laminated them with formica. I remember that when I was in high school, just about EVERYONE's parents went out and had custom wall units for the family room made (most of which were enthusiastically torn out a decade or two later, using the purchase of a HDTV that was too big to fit in the original space as a pretense; most people started to hate them a decade earlier, but couldn't bear to destroy them because they were so expensive in the first place).