Measuring for New Cupboard Doors

When building your own cabinets or measuring for new replacement cupboard doors in your existing kitchen or bathroom, this method works perfect. You are going to need to determine the overlay of your hinges before doing anything though.

Understanding About Overlay Hinges

Every cupboard door hinge has a particular overlay. It is simply the distance that the door extends past the inside of the cupboard’s edge. You must know this dimension before ordering your new kitchen or bathroom vanity doors.

How to Measure for New Cupboard Doors

Once you have the correct hinge selected, measure the inside opening of a two door cabinet. Add the overlay twice and that’s the new cupboard doors over all dimension.

Next, divide the figure by two and then deduct one eight of an inch. The final calculation will be the size for each door that needs to be ordered

Here’s an Example:

If the inside clear opening size of the cupboard is thirty inches and the “individual” hinge overlay is one half inch, then your overall size is thirty one inches.

Then, divide the thirty one by two and you will get fifteen and a half inches.

Next, subtract one eight off of fifteen and a half and the order size measurement of the door will be fifteen and three eights.

You may be wondering why it’s necessary to deduct the ⅛” dimension from each cupboard door measurement. This allows for the center margin between the kitchen or vanity doors to be ⅛” and also give you an additional one sixteenth on either side for adjustments.

Here’s my recommendation for replacing existing cupboard doors. To eliminate any margin of error, get new hinges that match the old ones and measure the existing sizes of your doors. If you replace things this way there’s basically no way of messing up.

If on the other hand you decide that you want to make the cupboards look different by changing hinge overlays and cupboard door sizes, you are in for a challenging task. You use the same method described above; You’re just going to have to pull out the calculator and work out all of the margins between the doors.

What ever your project entails, make sure of this one thing…check, double check and then triple check your measurements before ordering anything. Special order doors are very expensive to replace if you make a mistake.

As an example: Suppose one door comes in wrong. You order the door and it costs fifty dollars ($50) to manufacture it.

That’s all fine right…wrong. Then, the cupboard door company charges you an additional twenty five dollars ($25) for a single door order.

That would still be bearable, but you have to finish the kitchen in four days. So, now you tack on a “rush order” fee of thirty dollars ($30) and then decide to have it shipped next day air for an additional ninety dollars ($90).

Let’s see…that totals one hundred and ninety five dollars ($195) just for “one” mistake.

Whatever, DO NOT get in a hurry when measuring for kitchen or bathroom cupboard doors. It’s a good idea to have a friend go over what you have done as well.