Hanging Kitchen Cabinet Doors with Concealed Euro Hinges - Momplex Vanilla Kitchen

With the doors painted, it's time to take this -

And turn it into this -

Pretty crazy how just installing doors over cabinets can do that, isn't it?

The doors we ordered are measured for full overlay, and will require a Euro Style Concealed Hinge, 1-1/4" (sometimes referred to as Full Overlay), Face Frame.

Full Overlay means the doors pretty much cover the entire cabinet - there's a 1/2" gap between all doors and drawers, and that's it. You can also get Partial Overlay, where the door only covers part of the face frame.

It is important to note when figuring the right hinge if your cabinets are Face Frame or Euro Style. Face Frame means the cabinet has the 1x2 frame around the front (see first photo). Euro style means the plywood edge is exposed on the front, with no trim on the front.

Then there's the options - like soft close pins, or different opening degrees. For this kitchen, we are going standard on everything, so we ordered up standard hinges - no fancy bells or whistles.

But there is one thing to note - our hinges came with screws and those white larger "screws" if you will. Those are for MDF cabinets where you need a little more bite to grab into MDF.

Since our cabinets are framed in hardwood, we can remove those white things,

We'll just be using the screws to attach the hinges to the cabinets.

A highly recommend this little kit (I think it was around $14) for helping you bore holes for the hinges. You could also just use a forstner bit in the right size, but the guide proved to be very useful.

We marked out the location of our hinges on the doors,

And then placed the guide on the marked location.

The guide has three holes in it. We set our drill bit per instructions that came with the guide, and drilled three little holes through the guide.

This leaves three guide holes in the door.

The drill bit has a point on the end, that you place inside the middle pilot hole. That way there is no guess, it's just place the bit in the pilot hole,

Drill away (make sure you drill to the right depth and not all the way through the door - but I'm sure you know this)

And you've got a perfectly placed hole bored for the hinge.

Perfect fit ... no guessing or finger crossing required ...

And then the other two pilot holes are used to attach the hinge with screws.

To save time, we started the screws with the drill,

And then tightened them up to just right with a screwdriver. You don't want to strip the screw holes out.

Once the hinges are attached to the doors, we can now attach the door to the cabinet.

The hinge is designed to cup the face frame,

And it's just a matter of position the door, drilling pilot holes, and attaching the hinge to the face frame.

It really is that easy!

We used a spacer block to help us get a consistent gap at the bottom of the doors. It's the little things that save time and make DIY that much easier.