In this post, you’ll learn all about
– Cabinet door hinges
– Cabinet drawer slides
– What you need to consider when selecting this type of hardware
After nearly a year of part time work, our home office remodel is finally finished. Stop back on Wednesday and you’ll get a close up of our newly remodeled space. In the meantime, today’s post is about cabinet hinges and drawer slides. During our recent series on cabinet building a received a few emails asking about the hardware I’ve selected so I thought I’d put together a helpful reference post to help you select the best hinges and drawer slides for your next project.
The easiest way to explain all of this is in a video. Can I talk about hinges, drawer slides and drawer boxes for 20 minutes? What do you think?
(If you can’t see the video, click on this link to be taken directly to YouTube)
Let’s recap the most important aspects of the video.
Hinges
To select a hinge for your project, you first need to know what type of cabinet and cabinet door you have. Cabinets are either frameless (European) like Ikea cabinets or have face frames, which is typical for most American made cabinets. Next you’ll need to determine if the door is full overlay, partial overlay or inset. My kitchen cabinet doors are full overlay, but our office cabinet doors are inset. Generally, most kitchen cabinet doors on the market today are full overlay. Inset doors are more labor intensive and therefore are higher in cost and tend to be associated with custom and higher end cabinets. Partial overlay doors were more common in the 50’s and 60’s, but you can still occasionally catch them on some other pieces.
Once you know the cabinet type and the door type, you just need to determine if you want the hinges to be hidden or decorative.
I prefer Blum hinges since they are high quality. There is a planning tool on Blum’s website that will help you plan the doors and the hardware. I used the tool for the Clip Top Hinges with face frame.
Here’s a link to the Blum inset hinges I used on the office cabinets (affiliate). You’ll also need a forstner drill bit for the cup holes.
Drawer Slides
For our home office project, I used Blum Tandem drawer slides. They install with some rear brackets and side mounting blocks. They are a little more expensive than the basic European or epoxy slides, but they work great. Blum also has a Tandem drawer planning tool on the same page as the hinge tool. The big difference between drawer slides is usually the length. You can use the planning tool to get a recommendation on the slide hardware as well as the drawer box dimensions.
I hope this video helps give you a better understanding of cabinet door hinges and drawer slides.
Let me know if you have any questions!
