· by Michael Blair, Nashville's Cabinets
Kitchen cabinet doors drift. A door that hung straight when the kitchen was new droops at the handle side, rubs the door beside it, sits proud of the frame or refuses to stay shut. Nashville humidity plays a part, because the doors and the boxes swell and shrink through the year, and the hinges, which carry the whole weight on a few screws, work loose with a decade of use. Almost all of it is adjustable, and the concealed European hinges on any cabinet built in the last thirty years were designed to be adjusted.
Reading the door
Stand in front of the cabinet with the door closed and look at the gaps. A door that is higher on one side than the other, or that rubs the door next to it at the top or bottom, needs side-to-side adjustment on one hinge. A door whose gap to its neighbor is even but wrong, or that overlaps the frame more on one side, needs both hinges moved the same way. A door that sits out from the face of the cabinet at the top or bottom, or does not touch the bumper, needs depth adjustment. A door that is low overall needs height.
A door that closes and then springs back open is either hitting something, usually a drawer front or an adjacent door, or has a hinge whose spring has failed. A door that will not stay closed on an old cabinet with a magnetic catch may just need the catch moved.
The three screws on a concealed hinge
A concealed cup hinge has a cup set into the door and an arm that clips or screws to a mounting plate on the cabinet side. On the arm are two or three adjustment screws. The one nearest the door, running through a slot, moves the door side to side; turning it moves the door edge toward or away from the hinge side. The one nearest the back of the arm, often a cam or a screw in a slot, moves the door in and out from the cabinet face. Height is adjusted on the mounting plate itself, either with a cam or by loosening its screws and sliding it.
Adjust in small turns, close the door, look, and adjust again. Do both hinges when changing height or depth so the door does not twist. If a screw turns without changing anything, the hinge may have jumped off its plate; press the arm back onto the plate until it clicks.
- Side to side: the screw nearest the door, one hinge at a time
- In and out: the screw or cam at the back of the arm, both hinges
- Up and down: the mounting plate, both hinges
- Springs back: check for contact first, then the hinge spring
When the screws have stripped
A door that sags no matter how the hinge is set usually has hinge screws pulled loose from the door or the cabinet. In particleboard boxes, the most common cabinet material, the screw holes strip and the hinge rocks. Remove the screw, fill the hole with wood glue and toothpicks or a hardwood dowel, let it cure, and drive the screw again. Longer screws of the same gauge sometimes bite into fresh material. On a door, if the hinge cup has cracked out of its bore, the bore is filled and redrilled.
Older face-frame cabinets with surface-mounted or semi-concealed hinges have no adjustment at all; a sagging door on those is a stripped screw or a bent hinge, and the fix is repairing the holes or replacing the hinge with a matching one.
When it is the door, not the hinge
A solid wood door that rubs in August and clears in January is moving with the humidity, and the adjustment that fixes it in one season creates a gap in the other. Set it for the humid season with a little clearance and live with a slightly larger winter gap, or address the humidity in the kitchen. A door that has warped, twisted so one corner stands off the frame while the others touch, cannot be adjusted flat; a hinge with a built-in tilt adjustment can hide a little, and beyond that the door is replaced.
Hinges themselves wear. A soft-close hinge that has stopped soft-closing, a spring that no longer holds, a hinge arm that has cracked: these are replaced, and the good news is that cup hinges are largely standardized, so a matching replacement is usually a catalog item rather than a hunt.