One of the kitchen drawers in my apartment has, since I moved in, had a pull that was different from the other three. The other three are small brass pulls, slightly tarnished, original to whenever the previous tenant or the previous-previous tenant put the kitchen in. The fourth one was a black plastic knob that had clearly been a stopgap installed at some point when the original brass pull had broken or gone missing. The black plastic knob bothered me for almost two full years before I did anything about it.
Last spring, on a Saturday in April, I decided to fix it. I went to the small hardware store on the corner of Warren and Fifth, which is run by a man whose name I now know is Lou and who has opinions about every piece of hardware in his store. I told him I needed a brass drawer pull, small, to roughly match three other small brass drawer pulls of indeterminate vintage in a kitchen in an old building. He showed me four options. I picked the one that looked closest. I paid eight dollars and brought it home.
What went wrong
The pull I bought did not match. It was close but not close. The shape was right but the brass was a slightly cooler tone than the original three, and the finish was less worn. This was foreseeable and I should have foreseen it. I had bought a new piece of hardware to match three forty-year-old pieces of hardware, and I had not considered that the difference would be visible.
Also: the holes in the drawer for the original pull were spaced for the original pull, which had two screws, and the new pull was a single-screw knob style. I had to drill a new hole in the drawer to mount it. The drilling went badly. The hole is not quite centered. The pull, as a result, sits at a small but visible angle, leaning maybe four or five degrees off true.
I noticed the angle the moment I tightened the screw. I had two options at that point. I could remove the pull, fill the hole, redrill, and try again — which would have meant another trip to the hardware store for wood filler, several hours of work, and a real possibility of a second botched hole. Or I could leave the pull where it was, slightly crooked, slightly the wrong brass, and call the project done.
I chose, with some reluctance, the second option.
The slow process of making peace with it
For the first week, the crooked pull bothered me every time I looked at it, which was several times a day, because it was the drawer I keep the dishtowels in. I would open the drawer, see the crookedness, feel a small flicker of dissatisfaction, and continue with my day.
By the second week, the flicker had reduced. I noticed the crookedness only when I happened to be looking directly at the drawer face rather than at the handle. The flicker, when it came, was milder. It was beginning to feel like a feature of the apartment rather than a flaw.
By the second month, I had stopped noticing it almost entirely. The crooked pull had been absorbed into the broader fact of the apartment, which is an old apartment with a great many small irregularities, none of which I had created and most of which I had come to find charming. The crooked pull joined the radiator that ticks, the floor that slopes slightly toward the bathroom, the window that does not quite close, and the fourth burner that runs hot. The pull, in other words, became part of the apartment rather than an imposition on it.
What the project taught me about the threshold for trying
I have done a number of small repairs in this apartment over the past few years. Some have gone well. Most have gone something like the drawer pull went — passable, slightly off, fine in the long run. I have stopped expecting any of these projects to go perfectly. I have started instead expecting them to result in a thing that mostly works and that has been slightly improved by my having tried.
The threshold for trying, I have come to think, is much lower than the threshold for doing well. The threshold for trying is something like: do I have a free Saturday and eight dollars and the willingness to drill a hole in the wrong place. The threshold for doing well requires skill I do not have and probably will not develop. I have made my peace with operating at the threshold of trying and not at the threshold of doing well, and the apartment is full of small evidence of this peace.
The other things I have done badly
The curtain rod in the bedroom is slightly higher on one side than the other. The painting I hung in the hallway is slightly tilted to the left because the hook I put in did not go into a stud and I am afraid to redo it. The shelf I built for cookbooks above the counter is square enough but the brackets do not quite line up. There is a touch-up paint job on the doorframe that did not blend.
None of these are doing harm. All of them are small improvements over the state of things before I attempted them. Each of them required a Saturday and a small amount of money and the willingness to operate outside my skill level. I am, on balance, glad I did them all.
The argument against perfectionism in a rental apartment
The drawer pull project has become, for me, a kind of touchstone for a broader argument about the threshold for action. The drawer pull is in a rented apartment. I will not live here forever. The next tenant may not care about the brass color or the angle of the knob. The drawer pull is, in the long run, a temporary improvement to a temporary residence, and the standard I should be holding it to is not perfection but is something like: is this better than the black plastic knob.
It is. It is better than the black plastic knob. The brass is closer to the original than the plastic was. The slightly wrong tone is still warmer than the cold black of the plastic. The angle is annoying but not visible from across the room. The drawer functions perfectly.
I open it every morning, on the way to making coffee. I take out a dishtowel. I close the drawer. The pull is slightly crooked. I do not, anymore, feel the small flicker of dissatisfaction. I feel, if anything, a small flicker of the opposite — the satisfaction of having a thing that I made happen, badly, with my own hands, on a Saturday in April, and that has continued to work for me ever since.
