Will new kitchen handles fit my existing holes?

Changing handles is the cheapest visible change you can make to a kitchen, and it turns into a much bigger job the moment the new handles do not match the old holes. Getting the measurement right at the buying stage is what keeps it a one-hour job.

What you'll need

• Steel rule or a tape measure
• Two-part wood filler, only if filling (optional)
• Touch-up paint or a repair kit, only if filling (optional)

Step by step

1. Measure centre to centre, not edge to edge.Take the handle off, and measure between the centres of the two holes in the door. If you cannot get a rule between them, measure from the left edge of one hole to the left edge of the other — same answer, easier to sight.
2. Match to a standard.Handle centres are a standard series: 32, 64, 96, 128, 160, 192, 224, 256, 320, 480 and 640mm. If your measurement lands within a millimetre or two of one of those, that is what you have.
3. Check the door thickness against the screws supplied.New handles come with screws for an average door. A 22mm shaker door and a 16mm slab door need different lengths, and M4 machine screws are cheap and available in every length.
4. If the centres do not match, look at handle shapes that cover.A cup handle fixes with two screws but its shell is wide and can be positioned to hide an old hole. A handle on a solid backplate covers a wide area. A knob on a large rose covers a single hole. These are the honest options.
5. Consider moving to a longer handle with wider centres.If the old centres are 96mm and you want 160mm, the new holes fall outside the old ones and the old holes are exposed. If you go the other way, the old holes are inside the new handle and are often hidden behind it.
6. Test-fit before drilling anything.Hold the new handle against a door, with the old holes visible, and look at it from a normal standing distance. This settles whether it covers far more reliably than measuring.
7. Fill only where the door finish can take it.Painted timber and painted MDF fill and touch in acceptably. Foil-wrapped, high-gloss and laminate doors do not — there is no filler that matches a gloss foil, and the repair will always catch the light.
8. If filling, use two-part filler and treat it as a paint job.Pack the hole from both faces, cure hard, sand flush, prime, and paint the whole door rather than spotting it. Spot repairs on a door face are visible from every angle.
9. Accept the alternative: new doors.If the doors are foil-wrapped and the handles cannot be matched, the cost of fifteen doors is not far from the cost of a bad repair on fifteen doors that you look at every day.

Tips

• Take an existing handle to the shop. Comparing physically settles in five seconds what a measurement debates for an hour.
• The same centre distance can look very different depending on the handle's overall length and projection. Check the projection too if you have a narrow galley kitchen where you walk past the handles.
• Handle-free kitchens use a J-profile rail or a push-to-open catch. Converting a handled kitchen to handleless means new doors — the rail is part of the door profile.

Common mistakes

• Measuring the overall length of the handle instead of the centres — The overall length is not a standard and tells you nothing about the fixing holes. Only the centre distance matters.
• Assuming filler will disappear on a gloss door — It will not. Any filled hole on a high-gloss or foil-wrapped door catches the light at some angle, and there is no product that fixes that.

Questions people ask