Replacing Cabinet Doors with Solid Wood: Sizes, Hinges and Cost

Most kitchen cabinets are fine. The boxes are square, the drawers run, the layout works. It is the fronts that date a kitchen, and the fronts are the part you can replace in an afternoon. This is how to measure for replacement cabinet doors, what to know about hinges, what a kitchen's worth costs in solid hardwood, and when solid is the right answer.

Measure the fronts you have

If the existing doors fit, measure them, not the openings: width across and height up, to the eighth of an inch, and write down which are doors and which are drawer fronts. Note any pair of doors that share one opening and any front that was trimmed to clear a wall or an appliance. That list, front by front, is the door list, and it is exactly what the Builder asks for. If a front is missing or you are changing the layout, measure the opening and tell us the overlay you want in the notes and we size it.

Overlay and inset

Almost every kitchen built since the 1990s is full overlay: the door covers the box's front edge and the gap between two doors, the reveal, is about 1/8 in. Face-frame cabinets with partial overlay show a strip of frame around each door; inset doors sit inside the frame flush with it. Overlay fronts are the easy replacement, because the door size is simply the door size. Inset fronts need the opening measured and a reveal chosen, and we would rather read a drawing than guess, which is what the plans path is for.

Hinges

Modern frameless cabinets hang on 35 mm cup hinges: a round cup bored into the back of the door, an arm that clips to a plate on the box. If your hinges are IKEA Utrusta, choose that under hinge boring and we bore the cups at that spacing; for any other hinge, choose a custom pattern and tell us the cup spacing from the top and bottom and the set-back from the edge, or attach a photo of the back of an old door. You can also take the doors unbored and let your installer bore them. Drawer fronts fasten from inside the drawer and ship undrilled.

Thickness

Most replacement fronts are 3/4 in, which is what the existing hinges expect and what we recommend for drawer fronts and doors under 10 in wide. Over 10 in across the grain we recommend 7/8 in, which stays flat on a wide door without a width cap, and the same cup hinge takes it with the extra eighth behind. The Builder suggests the thickness for each size as you type it.

What a kitchen costs

At today's white oak board foot, a 15 × 30 slab door is about $270 and a 30 × 10 drawer front about $155, finished. A small kitchen of ten fronts comes to roughly $2,300 in slab; a typical fifteen-front kitchen roughly $3,400; a large kitchen of twenty-five fronts with a few tall pantry doors roughly $6,500. One-piece shaker adds about a sixth to those figures and the textures about a third; walnut adds a little and the exotics a lot. Unfinished doors for your own finisher are a little less. The Builder prices your list live, so the number is yours in a minute, not an estimate.

When solid hardwood is the right call

A solid door is the same wood all the way through, so the edge you see when the door is open, the hinge cup and the back are the face wood, and a scratch is oiled out rather than lived with. It is heavier than a hollow door and it moves a hair with the seasons, which is why we recommend 7/8 in over 10 in wide and why every door is finished on both faces. It is the right call when you expect to keep the kitchen, when the boxes are sound, and when the fronts are the thing you look at every day, which they are. Unfinished cabinet doors are available in every wood if you would rather finish them yourself.

Hanging them

New fronts arrive boxed by run with a spec sheet that says which door hangs where. Clip the hinges on, set the reveals with the hinge's three adjustments, and a kitchen's worth of doors is an afternoon. Lead time is 4-6 weeks today. If your cabinets are IKEA Sektion, the Sektion page has the sizes as presets.

Two ways to order. Price your doors in the Builder, front by front with a live price, or send us your plans and we build the door list for you, at the same prices, within one business day.