I know next to nothing about kitchen appliances as is but in particular, ovens. I don’t really go near mine. My husband is the chef & I make a mean bowl of cereal. To quote my forever style icon Carrie Bradshaw… “I keep sweaters in my stove!” You get the picture.
So when tasked to procure “the red knobs” for a Wolf oven at one of our listings in Chatham New Jersey, I didn’t fully understand why this was needed. After a quick Google search, I texted Steph, “are you sure we want to order these? They’re $28 a piece!” (thinking that was high). Steph thought that seemed inexpensive so I did some more digging.. Turns out that was for the Wolf toaster oven knobs. More searching…best price I now found was a little under $100 per knob…. We needed EIGHT. I thought, this is crazy, almost EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS? For knobs?? Are they lined with diamonds? But what do I know… my oven is sweater storage.
Our client had her Wolf oven custom ordered with all black knobs. It was perfectly fine. The black knobs matched the kitchen WAY better in my opinion. I thought for sure Steph was going to say let’s skip it, we’ll just stick with the black…WRONG AGAIN.
She explained it to me in the terms I could understand. You wouldn’t buy Louboutins if the bottoms were black. You wouldn’t buy a Fendi purse without the signature hardware. That gave me my A-HA moment. These are the realtor equivalent to the LV pattern on a Louis Vuitton bag. I clicked add to cart & waited for the arrival of these designer oven accessories.
Fast forward to staging day, the day before listing photos… I needed to install these red gems. I stood in foreign territory… in front of the oven….one small bead of sweat formed on my forehead. OK- remove black, install red. I can do this. Why couldn’t I keep the doom & gloom thoughts of “am I going to blow up this house before we even get it to market?” out of my head?
Surprisingly- the knobs slid right off & on! I went back every 7 minutes for the next hour to make sure the range wasn’t on & to make sure I wasn’t going to take out Steph, myself & the entire CHC Staging team in a giant gas explosion. But the stove remained cool as a cucumber. Success. Our stager even said, “oh yeah, the red knobs make it way more Wolfy”.
What did I learn? It’s all in the details.
