We have an adorable piece of furniture called a pie safe that came from my grandmother (hence the terrible pun in the title of the post). It lives in our study, and we use it to store linens.
As cute as it is, I felt like it could use a little sprucing up. My first instinct was to paint it, but I decided to hold off on that because who knows how we'll want to use it down the road and the natural wood might be nice in whatever space it ends up in (like a very white kitchen with natural accents). Instead, I decided on a relatively quick and easy project: swapping out the knobs.
I found two knobs I liked in the discount bin in Anthropologie, and a third at the local hardware store. However, I knew upon purchasing them that I would have a bit of an issue: the stems were much too long for the pie safe doors, as evidenced below.
Normally this would be a big obstacle for me, but enter one of my new amazing Christmas presents from my dad and stepmom: a dremel.
Using the dremel, it took me about 5 minutes to fix the issue -- 4.5 minutes to figure out how the dremel works, and 30 seconds to trim the knobs to size. Here's a (terrible) shot of the dremel in action (kind of hard to use and photograph at the same time):
And the finished result, a nice close cut:
A shot of the top knob in better lighting:
And it was similarly easy to add the other two. Here's the middle one:
The bottom pull was originally black:
To make it fit in with the other two pulls, I used some craft paint I had on hand to create a light turquoise color.
I only used one coat of paint, to leave it with a somewhat roughed-up vintage look:
And here's the pie safe with the updated knobs:
A very quick and inexpensive project, but I like the new look for now!
