How to Make a Kitchen Cabinet Door
Curb Appeal in Your Cooking Area; Spruce Up Your Cabinitry
What a DIY'er needs to know about building kitchen cabinet doors. This article covers wood selection, finish selection, and types of hinges.
How to Make a Kitchen Cabinet Door
Kitchen cabinet doors sustain a lot of use on a daily basis, yet get little respect. Actually, the one time they get any mention is when they don't close properly. Perhaps you're building kitchen cabinet doors since your old ones gave up the ghost or maybe you're installing new cabinets and need to put your distinguishing touch on them.
Also, there will be times when you're refinishing kitchen cabinets that one door is just not salvegable. In this case, you'll have to duplicate the old one.
A Plan of Action
The initial thing to take into consideration is what kind of a finish you are going for. For a natural finish such as tung oil, varnish, or polyurethane, the cabinet door wood needs to match the cabinet wood. If you insist on them being different, keep them consistently different and create a consistent theme.
In order to match, the wood should be the same so that the grain and color is respectably similar. Consider, oak has a characteristic “pin” looking grain, but few oak varieties are the exact color. Oak ranges from bleached to darkish red.
If you're building kitchen cabinets or doors yourself, and not prefab, know that kitchen cabinet doors use a boatload of trim. If the bankroll is an issue, avoid pecan, walnut, oak, and the like, and check out poplar. This hardwood is easy to work with, glues well, is affordable, and has a range of color streaks that are easy on the eye.
The Architecture of a kitchen Cabinet Door
Your basic kitchen cabinet door is a flat slab of wood or more commonly, plywood, usually with some beveled edges, and hinged to your cabinets so that it covers your cabinet's openings.
If you are after more sophisticated cabinet doors, think of the cabinet door as a picture frame. But you're not constrained to glass, a backing of the wood the cabinet is constructed from is common as well. The average cabinet door is made of a frame which is constructed to fit just inside the cabinet opening, with molding surrounding the edges to lend a decorative effect and to be a stop, making it flush to your cabinet, and maybe an inlay; this will give the door depth.
Hardware for Cabinet Doors
All your cabinet doors have hinges. There are many styles available on the market today and they are quite affordable. You may use hinges that are recessed, spring loaded, flush mounted, etc. The more complex the hinge is, the more complex the installation will be.
Your cabinet doors will need to have some catches. There are fundamentally two kinds of catches: magnetic and friction. The basic idea is to keep the doors snug within their frames. This keeps the doors from swinging wide open unexpectedly. It will also keep your family pet(s) from exploring your food hidey-hole.
If you have a toddler, there are a slew of products on the market intended to kid-proof kitchen cabinets. This isn't only a recommendation – it's an obligation.
Finishing Your Cabinet Doors
There are quite a few good methods to finish cabinet doors. Doors should be finished the same way as the cabinets are. If they're going to be painted, make sure to use a high quality primer. Then finish them using your choice of paint. For a smooth finish, spray it on.
The most attractive cabinets have been finished with some clear finish that showcases the expensive hardwoods that were used in their construction. You can stain them prior to applying the finish coat if you desire or just finish with tung oil, polyurethane, or varnish. Tung oil is recommended for kitchen situations because it has excellent water repellent properties.
