Handles Handling

Most of the cabinets are installed except for the sliding doors, toe kicks and handles!

From the very beginning I planned to use "edge pull" handles, but Noor said that there will be an additional cost due to the necessity of routing down the surface in order to embed the edge pull seamlessly on top of the cabinet. I didn't want to incur additional cost so I decided to go with surface mount handles.

As it's time to make the selection, I basically picked out two stainless steel style and trying to accept them:

But putting them next to the finished cabinets just made me really want to have the edge pull/tab pull again. However, since the cabinets are done, now Noor wants to charge $30 extra per drawer to install them. I understand that routing is a lot of work, but an extra $30 seems excessive. Besides I have over 40 drawers and doors... Don't forget, this is in addition to the cost of the handles. So I am trying to find edge pull handles that are very thin so as to avoid the routing cost.

I looked at so many sites, and they are all just a little bit off.
In order for the tab to look nice, I want them to flush with the overhang of the counter.
The counter is 3/4" projected from the side of the cabinet. The thickness of the plywood is 3/4 " , so the ideal is to have 1.5" depth, 1/16 inch of thickness, 3" to 6" length.

This is the closest I could find:
For a tab pull:

For an edge pull:

Both of these fit the requirements of thickness. The edge pull fits the requirement of depth but not the tab pull. However, there is another issue with edge pull that may make using them impossible. The problem is the drawers are built with a base box and then a face is added to the front. The top drawers are all fine as their inner boxes are lower than the front face. But the rest of the drawers the inner boxes are too high with less than 1/2" difference with the outer face, so only tab pull can be used in those cases...

Top drawer with a good inch gap between the inner and front face.

The rest of the drawers have less than 1/2 inch gap.

The major reason I objected to the surface mount handles are because of the massiveness of the handles. I want to have a minimal surface look instead of a lot of hardware. So Noor suggested to use the same wooden handle to blend in. Here is how it will look:

Not sure about that either. Of course none of these choices are "bad," just that I really want the edge pull look. So the search must go on.