When we were looking around for affordable knobs for a kitchen cabinet we wanted to use as furniture, we spent quite a bit of time hunting for ones that were the moderne shape we liked, only to discover that the finish was awful: too-shiny, too-brassy, too…cheap looking. Since the knobs we found had great lines and were inexpensive, we decided to try hacking them: we sanded them with fine sand paper to take most of the brassy coating off, and bring them down to the base metal (or was it the other way around?). We liked the roughed-up look even better than what we had in our heads.

We LOVE hacking things, customizing them, “overcoming their limits”, as Scott Burnham writes in his the very interesting pamphlet on hacking, “creating new options on one’s own terms”.

Is there anything that cannot be hacked?  As we look around us, we think: It’s pretty much our imagination that limits what we can or cannot hack…

Related post: Kitchen Cabinets as Furniture

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3 replies on “hacking cabinet knobs

  1. Those knobs are quite nice and I love this idea! Where did you pick up the knobs?

  2. Sorry, it’s been a few years and I’m afraid I don’t remember where I got them but was thrilled to find them as others I saw were so expensive. It was the line (shape) not the coating I was going for; it turned out the cheap coating came right off. Maria Robledo, whose cabinets we blogged a while back found some similar ones at http://www.afnewyork.com/, though they might be pricey.

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