Cabinet Shelves Should Align With Glass Mullion Door Slats

Not long ago I was installing a white kitchen cabinet that had adjustable shelves and framed glass mullion doors from Lowe’s. When I installed the shelves they did not align with the doors horizontal slats pieces. Prior to installing the cabinets, I checked to see if there was a difference in the shelf holes positioning, there was not.

I was very surprised when I hung the doors and then put the adjustable shelves in place that they did not line up with the cross pieces in the doors. I took a good look at it from all angles and it actually looked horrible.

I could tell that it was going to be necessary for me to drill some new adjustable shelf holes in the cabinet sides to make the shelves align properly with the rails in the mullion door design.

If your cabinet shelves are not aligning with the cross pieces, the process of drilling new holes is tedious but must be done in order for the kitchen glass display cabinet to be correct.

In, my case, the shelf pins required a 1/16” wide hole for the metal pin on the shelf support to insert into. The sides of the kitchen cupboards were built using ½” particle board and the depth of the shelf support inserts were one quarter of an inch.

I inserted the drill bit into the drill and then measured how much of the drill bit was sticking out. The dimension was 1 ¼.” I cut a block of wood that was 15/16” x ¾” to use as a stop. The stop would only allow the drill bit to go 5/16” deep into the particleboard cabinet sides. This would work fine because the shelf pin was ¼” deep. The reason that I made this drill bit stop was to protect against me drilling all the way through the cabinet sides where there were finished ends.

Next, I calculated the distance from the center of the shelf support to where the bottom of the board would actually rest on the plastic pin. The distance was ¼.” So, when I determined exactly where I wanted the bottom shelf to set, I dropped down ¼” allowing for the difference from the shelf pins center to the actual resting place. Then, using a pencil, I made accurate marks on the cabinet. Double checking everything very closely, I then drilled the holes in the cabinet sides.

There are many drawbacks to ordering cabinets from large home centers such as Lowe’s. This type of situation is cabinet making 101. The shelves should have been designed so that they lined up with the mullion door slats. There really is no excuse for this type of poor quality kitchen cabinet fabrication, it is unacceptable. However, this is the kind of thing that you can expect when ordering cabinetry from home centers like Home Depot or Lowe’s.