Cupboard doors with hidden hinges

First of all, welcome to this 100th diary entry in our building saga. As you can see, things do take time when you want to do it all yourself, but at least it is also very rewarding, both psychologically and financially (through savings!).

This diary entry will concentrate on how we have built the top doors in our cupboards. These have hidden hinges, rather than being sliding, as this turned out to be a much cheaper options. We could, of course, have done this for the bottom doors too (and thus saved money), but due to space we thought it would be nicer to have sliding doors.

Anyway, to show you how the top doors have been done, here are some pictures with explanations below:

Step 1: make a template, both for the actual door, and for the place it will be fitted. As can be seen from the picture, the hinges come in two parts, those fixed to the door, and those fixed to the side of the cupboard. In order to make the installation and marking work easier, we made these two templates which were used for all the doors.

Step 1 Continued: The two pieces joined together as the door will be to the cupboard.

Step 1 continued: An important detail - when fixing the part of the hinges that will be fitted to the side of the cupboard, make sure that the screws come through the piece of wood. This way, the screws can be used to mark where the hinges should be place in the cupboard.

Step 2: Place the template where you want the door to be, at the right height. This is seen from the outside of the cupboard.

Step 2 Continued: Seen from the inside of the cupboard. This part was pushed hard towards the wall f the cupboard to make the marks in the picture below:

Step 2 continued: Marks from template. These are used to put the part of the hinges in the right spot.

Step 3: First part of the hinges are installed in the side of the cupboard.

Step 4: Measure width of the door. By fixing the template to the side of the cupboard, we could then measure how wide the door would have to be.

Step 4 Continued: The measurement was then recorded for all the doors in the cupboard.

Step 5: Using the template and the measurements taken above, we could then mark out how wide the door should be on the piece of ply used for the door. The doors were then cut to the right size.

Step 6: The template (without the hinges) was then used to find the right location for the holes to be made in the door.

Step 6 continued: We used our drill press with a 35mm bit to take out the necessary wood for the hinge to fit. It is important to ensure that you do not make the hole too big, as it is very easy to come out on the other site of the door. By using the drill press we could set the right depth to be used and not having to think about it for every hole to be made.

Step 7: The hinges are then fixed to the door. We used a square just to make sure that they were installed straight.

Step 7 continued: Both hinges installed. It should be mentioned that we actually did the sanding of the door before installing the hinges. Luckily the ply we used were of a good quality so we did not have to sand that much to get the finish we wanted.

Step 8: Install. The door is then installed by fitting the two pieces of hinges together. They are then adjusted using the screws to ensure that they close properly. It is possible to get a "bluemotion" mechanism for these hinges so that they become soft closing, but for the moment we have not bothered about this. It basically just clicks on the hinge and can easily be installed later if we want to do so.

So there you have it - easy to do and heaps cheaper than getting a carpenter in to do the job!

Any problems, please email webmaster. This page was last updated 24/07/2008