Adjusting a door hinge in your kitchen cabinet is such an easy thing to do once you understand what each alignment screw stands for. Any door hanging, gap between doors and their bases or sideways alignment issues can be easily solved once you understand your hinge.
Most kitchen cabinets will have European style hinges (also known as Blum hinges). After a few thousand open-close cycles, they may get a bit loosened that cabinet door alignment issues crop up. Doors can lose alignment vertically, horizontally, or depth-wise. Fortunately, the adjustment screws can take care of alignment issues in all three directions.
How to Adjust a Kitchen cabinet Door?
It is very easy if you just take a look at the picture above (Click here for an enlarged picture).
The Euro-style hinges have two parts – One part on the cabinet base (Base) and the other on the cabinet door (Door). The alignment or adjustment will be always done on the cabinet base part alone.
On the cabinet base part, there are four screws of our interest as marked (H, D and S) in the picture. You can adjust the height, depth or sideways alignment using a Phillips screwdriver (or sometimes known as a Star screwdriver) on these screws.
Height adjustment
For height adjustment, you need to work with the two screws marked as ‘H’. You have to slowly unscrew (anti-clockwise) these two screws for no more than one or two turns to loosen the door hinge a bit. Please note that usually doors will have two such hinges and to adjust the height you have to loosen the same screws on other hinges as well. Do not unscrew it completely or else the door might get detached completely which makes things difficult if you are alone. Usually, one or one and half turns anti-clockwise is good enough to adjust the height.
After unscrewing, raise or lower the cabinet door to the correct height and re-tighten the screws to secure the door. If you are in doubt as how much to raise or lower, you may mark the upper and lower edges of the hinge with a pencil before unscrewing to get an idea on how much to move.
Depth adjustment
Use the screw marked ‘D’ to adjust the depth of the door. This helps in getting your door’s face to be in line with the other cabinet doors nearby or close any space between the door and the cabinet base. To adjust the depth, loosen this screw and push or pull the door to the right level and then re-tighten the screw.
Side to side adjustment
To fix the sideways alignment issues, Turn the screw marked ‘S’ clockwise to move the door to the right. To move the door to the left, just turn the same screw counter-clockwise. Please note that we are talking about doors with hinges on the right side here.
If the hinges are on the left side, you need to just change the direction. i.e. To move to right turn counter-clockwise and to move to left, turn clockwise.
I trust that your kitchen cabinet door is in perfect alignment now! As I said before, be gentle and start with half turn or max one turn. Also note that the innermost screw is the depth adjustment one and the outermost one is the side-to-side adjustment screw regardless of whether the hinge is on the left or right.
