How to Reface Kitchen Cabinets

How to Order New Doors and Drawers

Family Handyman

There are three standard types of cabinet doors: overlay, inset and 3/8-in. lip (Figure B). Regardless of what type of doors you currently have, in most cases, you can replace them with overlay doors that use modern, fully adjustable cup hinges. And that’s the situation we’re showing here.

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To size the doors, you’ll need to decide how much of the door you want to extend past the face frame opening. This is called the overlay distance and is determined by the hinges you install. To keep it simple, our expert cabinet remodel builder gives his customers a choice between 1/2-in. overlay, which is the most common, or 1-1/4- in. overlay. Depending on the hinge, you can choose a different overlay if you like. The 1-1/4-in. overlay doors hide more of the face frame for a more contemporary look. But the extra door width can cause problems. You have to measure carefully at inside corners and between doors to make sure there’s enough room. And remember, the new drawer fronts will be the same width, so check at inside corners to make sure there’s clearance for the drawers to open without handle conflicts. Also, there’s usually not enough space to add the extra 1-1/4 in. to the top and bottom of both doors and drawer fronts, so you may have to customize these overlay distances.

For our kitchen, we ordered doors that overlay the cabinet 1-1/4 in. on the sides and bottom, but reduced the top overlay to 3/4 in. Then he reduced the top and bottom overlay of the drawers to 3/4 in. to avoid conflict with a built-in breadboard. If you decide to order an overlay greater than 1/2 in., you can check the fit by applying tape to the face frame to represent the outside edges of the doors and drawers. This allows you to visualize the doors installed and alert you to any problems.

The most critical part of the cabinet door refacing job is measuring for and ordering the new doors and drawers. Start by making a sketch of each wall of cabinets showing the doors and drawers. Then measure the openings and write down the measurements—width first, then height (Figure A). Double the overlay distance and add this to the opening size to get the size of the door or drawer. For example, if the opening is 18 x 20 in., the door size with a 1/2-in. overlay would be 19 x 21 in. If you want a pair of doors to cover one opening, add two times the overlay to the opening size as usual. Then subtract 1/4 in. for clearance and divide this number by two to get the size of each door.

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Calculate drawer front sizes the same way. Add two times the overlay distance to the opening size to arrive at the drawer front size.

Inside corner cabinets with or without rotating shelves can be a little trickier. We found that we can replace most existing corner cabinet doors with a “scissors-hinged” door—that is, a pair of doors hinged together and hung from one pair of hinges (see below). Ask your cabinet door supplier for help figuring the size of corner cabinet resurface doors.

Double-check all your measurements and calculations before you place the order.

Source: https://gardencourte.com
Categories: Kitchens