Where Should I Drill For the Cabinet Door Knobs?

How short are you? This could determine where you should drill the 3/16” hole in the cabinet door for the handle or knob. I’ll never forget the year when I drilled all of the cabinet doors for the new cupboards I had installed in my home and the wife got upset with me. She is about five inches shorter than me. I had placed the handles where we would normally install them for any customer. Well the cupboard doors were all special order raised panel maple. So, there really was no inexpensive way to cure her frustration. We decided that she needed to spend some time in therapy to get over it.

Not really, in all honesty she never again said a single word about it. The height of the people using the kitchen cupboards should be taken into consideration though.


I generally drill the cabinet door for the knob in line with the horizontal line of the raised panel door frame. This usually measures in the neighborhood of about two and a half inches up or down from the outside edge of the door frame. Then I just center the hole in the middle of the frame from left to right.

If the doors are flat and do not have any frame, then I will measure the height of the center of a standard drawer, which is about three to two and seven eights inches, and install the knob that distance down from the top of a base door. From left to right, I will mark the location about an inch and a half in from the outside edge of the cabinet door.

Some people like to measure half the distance of the door frames in both directions and the place the knob there.

There really is not a standard for the cabinet door handles or knobs placements. Just make sure that you install the kitchen or bathroom vanity cabinet door knobs to look balanced and centered correctly.