The good news is that there isn’t exactly a right and a wrong way when it comes to kitchen cabinet pulls and knobs. The bad news is that sometimes you just want a little direction so you feel like you know what the hell you are doing.

When we initially upgraded our kitchen we went with IKEA cabinets, but we weren’t entirely sure what style kitchen we wanted yet, we just desperately needed the storage. We also knew that we wanted some higher-end finishes but it just wasn’t in the budget at the time.

Now we are upgrading a few things systematically and the kitchen cabinet hardware is pretty high on the list and an easy fix. Swapping out hardware is a great way to give your kitchen a refresh even if you don’t have the budget to do a full renovation. The only thing to keep in mind is where the holes for handles currently are. Replace knobs with knobs and pay attention to if your handles have 1 or 2 holes that they are attached into. It may limit your options a tiny bit but will save you a headache of patching holes and having them look not so great.

Here’s my step-by-step guide from researching to ordering cabinet handles & knobs.

Find your style
This seems easy until you actually start looking around. What is it exactly that you like? Or do you just know it when you see it? Do you like brass, gold, black or silver? What colors are currently in the kitchen and surrounding area?
The tricky part is sometimes there are things you like but they don’t really go with your home. I try and keep a focus on things that align well with the architecture and time period of the house. Of course, you can buy whatever you’d like but if you design your entire house like a beach house in the middle of South Dakota that might seem a bit odd to buyers down the road. Save yourself the trouble of having to redo it again just to sell it.

This guide from Schoolhouse is the only one that I could find to help me figure out where my style and the period of the house aligned.

2. Figure out the combo of handles vs knobs that you want

This is where I started to get overwhelmed. You can do all knobs, all handles or a combination of the two. There is no right answer here. I had an inkling that we would like a combo of the two but I wanted to visualize it. So, I opened up Google Slides and made a not quite to scale drawing of all of our kitchen cabinets. For a small house we MAXIMIZED space in our kitchen and have 26 cabinets, it’s insane and probably one of my crowning achievements.

Here’s what it looks like.

This is opposite the island and the stove and oven are to the left but not shown.

This is actually two walls, but I wanted to visualize them together. The last 2 rows of drawers and cabinets are on a separate wall. There is also a microwave above the 30” drawer but I didn’t include it.

3. Screenshot some various knobs and handles that you like.

Download them and then remove the background. I used this website which is free and very easy. Then I just added them as images to my Google Slide and played around with different types and styles.

4. Pick out the correct sizes.

This was pretty annoying, to be honest. The general rule is that a handle or pull should be 1/3 of the width of the drawer or cabinet. I listed all of the measurements and then labeled them as S, M, L to help me just visualize a bit more. I still wasn’t happy with how to translate this into an online order so I made a spreadsheet. I love spreadsheets and I don’t care if you think I made this more difficult than it had to be.

This is what helped me figure out how which handles and knobs to choose, then I looked at pricing. To be honest there were some that I really loved but it would have been nearly $850 in total and I really didn’t want to spend that much on hardware when we have other things that we are trying to get done. I was able to find some that were very similar at a better price point and still managed to avoid buying them on Amazon. Which is great!

Is this more overwhelming or actually helpful? Feel free to comment below!

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