Measuring cabinet doors from the face frame opening

How to measure cabinet doors from the cabinet opening.

Measuring cabinet doors from the 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 clip top. This is a great hinge that works very well in a lot of different applications. It also has a huge amount of adjustment so your doors don't have to be perfect. We will assume an industry standard goal a 1/2" overlay.


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.

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 ¼” adjustment in all ways. This means that you can adjust the doors up, down, left, right, in, and out.


Written by,
Chad Barker