Advice on overlay door adjustment

[Bob Emerick]

I am seeking a little advice as I convert my partial overlay kitchen cabinet doors to full overlay. The issue/question I have is how would you compensate for extra face frame space at the ends of cabinets and where two cabinets adjoin?

The normal vertical face frame width, where doors are mounted and meet is 1 3/4”. So that results in half that distance to work with where doors meet and that full width at the ends of cabinets. The gap doubles when two cabinets are adjoining, such as on our island. In that case there is 3.5” of face frame in the center of the two cabinets 1 3/4 face frame between the doors in each cabinet, and 1 3/4 at each corner.

End result is that I either need to make one side of the door frame wider to compensate or leave more of a reveal at the corners and between two adjoining cabinets on the island.

What is the best practice in these cases?

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

[Jamie Buxton]

When you say partial overlay, you talking about a 3/8x3/8 rabbet on the back of the door, all the way around, right?

If so, I'd make the full-overlay doors and drawer fronts to have the same overall dimensions as the old partial-overlay ones. Basically, you'd just remove that rabbet. You repeat whatever spacing decisions the original builder made. You get to use standard half-overlay cup hinges.

[Bob Emerick]

Thanks Jamie. Yes, there is a rabbet around the edge of the current doors. Right now, the spacing between the doors is an inch or more between the edges of the doors. I was hoping to end up with 1/4 inch or less between doors.

[Jamie Buxton]

Thanks Jamie. Yes, there is a rabbet around the edge of the current doors. Right now, the spacing between the doors is an inch or more between the edges of the doors. I was hoping to end up with 1/4 inch or less between doors.

If you're changing the door widths, think ahead to what hinges you want to use. The usual long-arm cup hinges don't like to deal with an overlay which is more than 3/4". For larger overlays, you need to go to face-frame cup hinges. However, they have a large (3/16") gap between the back of the door and the front of the face frame.

[Kevin Jenness]

What Jamie said. For large overlays you need Euro cup hinges that mount on the face of the face frames.