Doorknobs of the Universe

I've been spending a lot of time in hardware stores lately, and since I have not been able to drag you with me, I have some stuff to show you to help you share in the joy and agony of these places.

I don't actually think a crystal butterfly as a sink knob fully qualifies as craziness, but I do think that whoever has to clean it will probably cry every time.  I'll pass.

I kind of like this one, too, but I think you'd have to love dolphins A LOT to get a faucet shaped like one.  Twenty bucks says everyone who gets this also has a dolphin tattoo.

This is even better because it's pretty terrifying.  I cannot imagine a small child encountering this faucet without screaming a lot.

And the coup de grace:

It's a monkey cabinet handle.  You have to wrap your hand around the monkey to open the cabinet.  This is a thing that people pay money for to put in their houses.  They choose to wrap their hands around a little brass monkey shinning down a pole holding some kind of jug with his tail every time they open a cabinet.  And they probably pay a whole lot for the privilege.  People.

So this above is what I do while I'm waiting for the helper people to help me with stuff--walk around taking pictures and snickering about stuff that I think is weird.  But really, a trip to the hardware store is all about this:

That's a (kind of blurry, sorry!) WALL OF DOORKNOBS.  Seriously, did you know that there are so many doorknobs in the world?  This is maybe a fifth of what there is in this ONE store.  Today I made my second trip to this particular doorknob store; I planned to just do all of this picking in one go the first time, but I had to go in, wander around, and run away because there was just too much.  Today I returned, armed with Consumer Reports reviews and my own opinions from driving around looking at doorknobs for a few weeks.

I discovered that doorknobs are something you have to try out.

NOT the doorknob I chose.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but it really matters to me how a doorknob feels in your hand.  So I have about a zillion of these shots, both as a test for myself, and to show my husband, who won't be testing the knobs himself, the relative sizes of all of the hardware.

Also, bin pulls.  And cabinet knobs.

And hinges, and doorstops.  I didn't even know I had to choose stuff about hinges, you guys.  These three below have different radii--which is how relatively sharp or curvy the corner is.  That's in addition to the size, number of screws, type of bar thingy holding the hinge together, number of hinges per door, and finish of the metal.  And brand.

I knew I'd have to choose stuff, but it does seem at a point that you could just go into the one doorknob store and say "I'd like a doorknob that works, please," and BOOM, there you go.  It's a delightful chore to have, I know, to be able to choose from among a zillion nice and exciting doodads, but in this moment, I kind of wish I had that dolphin tattoo to narrow my choices for me.

Or, you know, this: