Can I replace just the doors and drawer fronts on my kitchen?

Doors and drawer fronts are about 80 per cent of what you see and a much smaller share of what a kitchen cost. Replacing them is genuinely transformative and genuinely cheap by comparison, and the carcasses behind them are usually in far better condition than the doors because they have spent twenty years in the dark not being wiped with degreaser.

What you'll need

• Tape measure and a steel rule
• A written schedule of every door and drawer front
• Replacement hinges to suit the new doors
• Screwdriver, bradawl
• A 35mm hinge cup jig, if the new doors come undrilled (optional)

Step by step

1. Check the carcasses first, before anything else.Open every door and look inside. Swollen board anywhere near the sink or dishwasher, soft base panels, loose corners, missing back panels or units that rock all point to spending the money on a new kitchen instead. Sound, dry, square carcasses are worth re-dressing.
2. Check whether the layout still works.New doors do not move a sink, add a dishwasher or make a corner cupboard reachable. If the frustration with the kitchen is layout rather than looks, doors will not fix it and you will resent having spent the money.
3. Measure every door individually, in both directions.Do not assume the four doors on a run are identical. Write each one down against a sketch of the kitchen, in millimetres, measured to the nearest millimetre. Measure width and height on each.
4. Measure the hinge cup positions.For each door, measure from the top edge of the door to the centre of the top cup, and from the bottom edge to the centre of the bottom cup. Note the number of hinges — tall doors have three or four. Suppliers who drill for you need exactly this.
5. Measure the drawer fronts and count them.Drawer fronts are separate items with their own heights, and a run of four graduated drawers has four different fronts. Record which is which.
6. Note every special item.Integrated appliance doors, corner unit doors, oven housing doors, end panels, plinth, cornice and pelmet. These are what makes a door order incomplete, and they take longest to source.
7. Decide on drilled or undrilled doors.Having the supplier bore the 35mm cups to your measurements is worth the small charge, because boring them yourself needs a jig and a drill stand to keep them square. If you do it yourself, buy the jig — freehand 35mm boring wanders.
8. Order new hinges at the same time.New doors are often a different thickness from the old ones, and old hinges have tired springs and worn dampers. Fitting twenty-year-old hinges to brand new doors is a false economy that shows in the alignment.
9. Fit one door completely before opening the rest of the boxes.Hang it, adjust it, live with it for an hour. If the overlay is wrong or the colour is not what the sample suggested, you want to find out on door one and not on door nineteen.
10. Hang everything, then adjust the whole kitchen in one pass.Get every door on, then walk the run from a few metres back and set the gaps against each other rather than door by door up close.

Tips

• Take a door with you or send a photograph of the fitted hinge from the side. Overlay type and plate height decide whether new doors will land where the old ones did.
• Changing handles at the same time is the moment to do it, because you are drilling anyway and the old holes disappear with the old doors.
• Replacement door suppliers exist specifically for this, and many make to your measurements in any size. That is what makes the job possible on an old kitchen whose original range has long gone.
• If the worktop is also tired, price doors and worktop together. Doing them a year apart means doing the silicone and the upstands twice.

Common mistakes

• Measuring one door and multiplying — Doors in the same run are frequently not the same size, particularly where a fitter cut one to close a gap. Every door gets measured and written down.
• Ordering before checking the carcasses — New doors on wet or racked carcasses look wrong immediately and cannot be adjusted right. Half an hour with a torch before ordering saves the whole cost.
• Forgetting the appliance doors — Integrated appliance doors are a different size and fix differently. Discovering that after the rest have arrived leaves a kitchen with two obviously different fronts.

Alternatives

• Painting the existing doors: Far cheaper again, and genuinely durable if the degrease-abrade-prime sequence is followed. It cannot change the door style or fix a damaged foil wrap.
• Vinyl wrapping the doors: A film applied over the existing door. Cheap and fast, and the quality depends almost entirely on the fitter. Edges and around handles are where it fails.
• New doors and new worktop, keeping the carcasses: The full cosmetic refit. Usually a fraction of a new kitchen and visually indistinguishable from one, provided the layout is not the problem.

Questions people ask