Measuring
cabinet doors from the single cabinet opening brings about a few obvious
scenarios. One, you have either lost or the existing doors have been
removed and are no longer available. Two, you are tired of the existing
cabinet doors and wish to apply new doors to your existing cabinet
boxes. And three, most likely you are changing or updating the hinge
type to something other than the existing hinge used on the old cabinet
doors.
There are many different hinges that can apply a cabinet
door to a cabinet box. For this example we will assume an industry
standard hinge, like the Blum Compact 38n.
This is a great hinge that works very well in face frame applications. It also has a bit of adjustment so your doors
don't have to be perfect. We will assume an industry standard goal a
1/2" overlay using the Blum 38n 1/2" overlay hinge as an example.
The door "overlay", is how far the actual door
overlaps the face frame of the cabinet. Typically most cabinets (even
cabinets built with exposed hinges) will stay true to the ½” overlay
standard. If this is true, you should make sure to measure an opening,
and therefore the cabinet door, by the following rules:
Lets say
your opening is 10” wide and 20” tall. If I wanted to put 1 door on this
opening I would take 10” and add 1/2” to the left and 1/2” to the
right. This gets me an 11” wide cabinet door width. You would do the
same with the height as well. Take the 20” height and add 1/2” to the
bottom, and 1/2” to the top. This gets us a 21” tall cabinet door. Thus,
you will need to order a door with a width of 11” wide by 21” tall for
this single opening.
PAIR OF DOORS ON A SINGLE FRAME OPENING:
If
you have an opening with a pair of doors to be installed, it is
actually very easy to calculate. Say you have an opening of 20” wide by
30” tall. To calculate the width of each door you would take 20” and
divide by 2 (two doors). This gets us 10”. Then simply add 1/2” to the
width to account for the overlay of the cabinet door which gets us 10
1/2”. The width of each cabinet door you need to order will be 10 1/2”
wide. The height of the cabinet door is calculated the same as it would
be on a single door opening. Take the opening height of 30” and simply
add 1/2" to the top and another 1/2” to the bottom to get 31” for the
cabinet door height. To clarify, for this opening, you will need to
order 2 doors at 10 1/2” wide by 31” tall.
Keep
in mind that the Blum concealed hinges are very adjustable. You have
about a 1/8” adjustment in all ways. This means that you can adjust the
doors up, down, left, right, in, and out.
Warnings: Be sure that you have a 1/4" gap between the doors once
they are installed on the cabinet (only a very slight hairline gap is
needed between a pair of doors covering a single opening). This 1/4" gap
between doors will ensure that the door has room to operate freely
without rubbing other doors and/or objects.
