Kitchen: Routing Cabinet Doors

 DIY Kitchen Makeover: Routing Cabinet Doors

I knew that this open wall in our kitchen needed cabinetry!  We decided to build kitchen cabinets similar to our preexisting cabinets.  It would have been easier to buy new, but I think it would have made the old cabinets seem just that...very old in comparison.  Routing the cabinet doors similar to the originals was very easy with our Router!  And just so you know, a router is an AWESOME embellishing tool!  Routers shape, cut and decorate wood and in my opinion...they totally ROCK!!!

But, before I get to the tutorial...let me show you two beautiful inspiring kitchen...a girl's got to dream if she's going to stay motivated to get it done, right!  I'm crossing my fingers we have our own beautiful, jaw dropping kitchen, too someday!!!

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Routers come with many different attachments and there are tons of other attachments that you can purchase for more specific cuts.  When you use a router, you clamp down wood and then move your router around the wood in a counter clockwise direction.  When making a deep cut, you'll want to go over your wood in stages until you reach the depth you are wanting.  Stages helps out because otherwise the wood burns a bit. 

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In the top picture you can see how the cabinet door was originally, a typical square cut piece of wood.   When cutting a rabbet, you use the router to cut grooves in the cabinet, usually allowing the wood to fit snug in another piece of wood.  In this case, we used the rabbet cut to allow our cabinet doors to fit more custom.  Rabbet bits are adjustable to allow you to find the perfect width for your project.  For us, we cut about 1/4 in deep to keep consistent with the rest of the kitchen cabinetry.  Below you can see that we routed the inside, top and bottom of all of our cabinet doors.  And when we cut the width of the cabinet door, we cut it an 1/8 in shorter so that when the hinge shifted the doors towards the center they would mesh perfectly rather than overlap. 

Below is a picture of how we routed the outside, formerly square cabinet door.  We used a round-over bit for this cut.  We secured our doors carefully and in a counterclockwise direction moved our round-over router bit over the edge of all four sides of the wood to give a softer look to our cabinetry and to tie the new cabinetry in with the old cabinetry!  I think it turned out AWESOME and this was our first time to use our router!  So with that said...it's truly a pretty simple project!

Project Overview
Vintage Appliances
New Kitchen Appliances
Installing a Dishwasher
Installing an Oven
Building a Cabinet Base
Routing Cabinet Doors
Builiding Simple Drawers
Creating Custom Trim
Raising the Drop Ceiling
Beautiful Kitchen Inspiration
White-ish Granite Options

Granite Countertops Before/After

Painting Cabinets, Tons of Tips