We recently bought our first house which is a 1951 bungalow style house just outside of Minneapolis. It was a competitive housing market so despite a dingy kitchen, we loved the house! We decided to add value and enhance the look of the house so the first thing we wanted to do is update the kitchen. This is what we had to work with...

First thing on the list was to get rid of those old out dated cabinets. Our first thought was to simply paint the existing cabinets and update the hardware. Easy fix, right? But the closer we looked at the condition of the doors and the overall style, we quickly realized it would just be a lot of work to see little refresh in the look of the kitchen. The doors were scuffed from the wear-and-tear over the past 65 years, drawers were falling apart, and the style didn’t fit the modern kitchen we were really hoping to have. We knew a full overhaul of the kitchen wasn’t in the budget, so we decided instead to replace the doors and faces of the drawers with a cleaner modern design. Along with new doors, we added new hardware and moved the door hinges to the interior of the cabinets with a soft close feature you see on all new homes built today.

Not knowing where to start, we naturally turned to Google and found Woodworker's Hardware. We reached out to them and they walked us through the process of getting replacement doors and drawer fronts. We reviewed available cabinet door options and chose a mission style in the color white. The door and drawer fronts are a thermofoil material which is much more durable than a painted product. We then chose a modern pull made by Amerock that are not only functional, but add a beautiful touch to the kitchens overall appearance. The next thing we wanted was a soft close hinge but we didn’t want to see them as we did in our old kitchen. They helped us pick the right hinge to do the job. The hinge we used was a Blum “Inserta” hinge which meant there were no tools required to install it which was very helpful (I’m really glad they recommended this to us). With the help from Woodworker's Hardware we measured each opening carefully and added in the overlay to determine the actual size of the door and drawer front. We chose the option to have all the holes for the door hinges predrilled so that the installation would be much easier as we don’t have all the tools to do that kind of work.

Next, we needed to prepare the cabinets for the new doors. We removed all the old doors and drawers. We carefully filled all holes created from the old hardware, and sanded down all of the cabinets. Woodworker's Hardware sent us a color sample for the new doors, which we gave to the paint assistant at the hardware store so they could match to the color. We painted the cabinets with a primer and a couple coats of paint. We were ready for the new doors!

Our new door and drawer fronts were delivered directly to our house in about 4 weeks. We were impressed with how well they were packaged and each door and drawer front came covered with a protective film to help so they wouldn’t get damaged during the installation process. We started by installing a hinge plate on the cabinet and then inserted the hinge in the predrilled hole on the door and snapped the hinge into place on the hinge plate and the door was installed. It was really that easy. There are 3 adjustment screws we used to tweak how the doors fit on the opening to make sure all the gaps were equal. I’m sure glad we went with the predrilled hinge hole option on the doors as it made the installation process so much easier and there was no mess to clean up. Once the doors and door fronts were installed, we drilled the holes for our new pulls removed the protective film and we were done.

With a little sweat equity and the help of the pros at Woodworker's Hardware we were able to do this upgrade to our kitchen ourselves which saved us thousands of dollars. We absolutely love our new kitchen and enjoy the new look it gives to our home.