Kitchen Cabinet Hinges

Sep 23, 2007 5 Replies

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TheRegit 18 years ago

I am painting the kitchen cabinets in my house that was built in

1963. The person that built it did everything themselves so nothing is standard size. The main problem I have with the cabinet doors is that some of the don't hang straight. I went to Home Depot to take a look at replacement hinges and can't find anything like I had before. Everything that was there required me to drill a huge hole in the backside of my cabinet doors, which is something I don't feel comfortable doing myself. What are my options?

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My cabinets are like the image below where the vertial peice is the cabinet and the horizontal peice is the door. The door completely overlaps the side of the cabinet and the edge of the door is flush with the outside of the cabinet wall.

Can I take my doors somewhere and get the holes drilled? I would think if I went into a nice cabinet place they would tell me to take a hike since they aren't going to make any money on drilling some holes into someones existing doors? Would a store like Home Depot do it?

Please help. I am going to be selling my house and I really don't want the kitchen cabinet doors that I just spent hours repainting to be hanging crooked.

Thanks.

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marson 18 years ago

I would expect a place like Home Depot to have a pretty limited selection of hinges. Try

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for one.

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dadiOH 18 years ago

Why not? Tweak the hinges so they do.

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JimR 18 years ago

[snip] The main problem I have with the cabinet doors is

[snip]

Just Google "Cabinet hinges" and you'll come up with a lot of sources, with photos and descriptions of each hinge. The first one I checked advertised

2600 different hinge types, at

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I used them for a specialty hinge, which they had in stock. There are several other companies that came up on the search, including Myknobs.com, cabinetparts.com, wwhardware.com, usacabinethardware.com, etc.

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John McGaw 18 years ago

The "huge hole" hinges you refer to are likely 35mm "cup" hinges, AKA "European" hinges. They are probably the last thing you want for your application since the doors weren't designed to use them and drilling the holes properly really is quite difficult without the proper tooling. If the hinges you have now are not actually broken they can probably be cleaned, tweaked, and re-used. If the holes in the doors or cabinets are enlarged or in the wrong place they can be filled easily by sharpening a small dowel in a pencil sharpener, gluing the tip and tapping it into the hole, and then sawing off the excess. Repeat as necessary. Even if your hinges border on the ancient, replacements are probably available from a specialist supplier such as

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but anything from the 20th century on should be available at a decent hardware store.

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Bill 18 years ago

Why are the doors crooked? Surely they were hanging straight when they were installed. Are the hinges damaged? Or have some of the mounting screws pulled loose? If the latter, that's an easy repair. The holes can be partly filled with toothpicks or small dowels, and the hinge screws re-installed tightly. If the hinges are damaged, check some of the websites others have listed, and get matching replacements. Just because Home Depot doesn't have them doesn't meen they can't be found.

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