Kitchen Patrol

I've been working on my kitchen a bit lately. Today I scrubbed the majority of my cabinets. A little Murphy's Oil Soap, a rag, and some elbow grease, and I was rewarded (an hour or so later) with a bucket of surprisingly dirty water. Of course, this is only the second time since I moved in that such a thing has happened, so maybe it isn't so surprising. Maybe tomorrow (or Monday) I'll finish the scrubbing. Then I'll tackle the pulls.

The pulls are interesting. Not only are there fifty-three of them, more or less darkened with age, but they aren't solid brass. I tried polishing a couple of them, and while they cleaned up fairly well, it was soon apparent that their brass coating was more or less gone. Some of it came off as I was polishing, while the rest had eroded away from years of neglect and/or handling. I'm not sure what they are actually made of. All I can say for sure is that they aren't steel. Maybe aluminum or pewter.

I may be wrong about them not being solid brass. I went and looked again, and now I wonder if they weren't coated in varnish or something.

I think I'm going to try and polish all of them. I'll need to remove them to do a thorough job. Maybe Chris still has his Dremel laying around. That might do the trick. The only other matter is one of aesthetics: the pulls aren't always lined up as well as they might be. Part of that is due to the layout of the cabinets themselves, but part of it is the fault of whoever installed them. See the picture below for what I mean.

As you can see, the pulls on the doors of the lower cabinets aren't lined up with the drawers immediately above them. I'm wondering if I should put any effort into correcting that. They aren't very nice cabinets, and I'm not sure they're worth the effort.