Kitchen cupboard door advice please.

[Walnutpie]

Mine are elderly and starting now to not quite close, to creak, and drop. I've tightened hinges but only get a temporary improvement. I'm not clear if I need to replace the hinges entirely, or if I need new doors. Or completely new cupboards!

I'd like to change a couple iof cupboards into drawers, anyhow, I can see drawer boxes can be gotten easily enough, but can I buy if the shelf drawer fronts too? Or what?!

Lots of questions, sorry. Bit puzzled by how to get efficient doors and update my essentially well designed but old kitchen, even after much googling.

New hinges could really improve the situation, they are not too expensive from Screwfix and places like that.

To increase "drawers" you can use interior fittings to change your cupboard into a high front pull out like this - if you're interested I can explain how we did it.

I'm very interested!

Ok. You need to find a website for getting drawer boxes etc - ebay will do. geeky content follows. (and a rather 90s kitchen)

When we did it we were fairly low budget and we used Metabox drawer sides. These are metal sides that come in different heights. Sturdy but no-frills. We used the deepest version (H)for the bottom drawer that takes the weight of the door, and standard ones (M) for the higher drawers. With these you use your own wood for the base and back, cutting dimensions can be found online or on Blum website.

You could do the same thing using "Tandembox" drawers that are the swish full extension ones, it will just set you back a bit more. Use a pan drawer for the bottom unit and inner drawer units for higher up. Ikea do a version of this but of course it only fits Ikea cabinets.

As you can see in one cupboard we used drawers all the way, using offcuts of some bit of the kitchen for the inner fronts, in the other one we used wire baskets. In our case the handles of the former drawers were in the right place for opening the pull out but you may have to move your handle and neatly fill the holes.

So Raisingsteam you created drawer fronts out of a kitchen door and was it straightforward, as to how to attach your drawer front to the box?

I don't have IKEA cabinets. My doors are just MDF.

Thankyou for sharing this, it's very very useful. I see if we remove a door, and the inner shelf, we should be able to install a deep pan drawer and a shallower one above, or two deep drawers. That is good news.

The drawer front is the next issue to address.

You can easily get 3 of those shallow drawers inside your cupboard space. The drawer box screws to the front with a bracket - you can just see it.

The front that you see is simply the old door re-used. Ours was an in-frame kitchen so we had to screw the frame and fronts together into one big 'door'.
Didn't have to buy any new drawer front. When it's closed you just see your old door like it was before except handle is now top centre. This doesn't give you separate drawers with separate fronts I'm afraid, but it's a work around.

I see, yes, thankyou Raising.

As an experienced cabinet to drawer converter.. what do you think of these drawer fronts that have no fixings... asy to add to the blum boxes? or not?

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Solid-Oak-Kitchen-Shaker-Drawer-Front-Multiple-Sizes-/400896013653?

Yes absolutely fine if they match. just attach with short screws.

Ok!! Thank you for helping me hatch a plan!