When you get your new furniture home and test it out, inevitably there’s some issue with it that you didn’t think of in the showroom or when browsing catalogs online. Maybe the door swings open too wide or you need a different configuration, but can adjustments to doors for IKEA cabinets be simply done?
IKEA cabinets allow for a range of adjustments to the height, depth, and width of many aspects of their operation. You don’t need to be a handyman extraordinaire as IKEA has made it straightforward.
I’ll take you through some common tips and tricks to get the most out of your IKEA furniture as well as common pitfalls that you should try and avoid. You may need to do these adjustments if you have had your IKEA furniture for a long time and the doors have become misaligned through use. In the end, you’ll get your IKEA cabinets working just the way you want so you can relax and focus on the more important things in life.
Why Are My IKEA Cabinet Doors Not Closing?
There are a few main causes of why cabinet doors will not close. The most common is that due to an issue with the hinges the door is no longer aligned and will not close anymore.
There are three screws to adjust the hinge. You can fully adjust the hinges to make all your cabinet doors align nicely. Over time these screws can become loose which means the door does not close smoothly as it used to, but a quick adjustment can put the doors back to their factory-new condition.
Hinges may start having issues if the door continually gets closed with too much force, or when an object gets caught in the doors. Keep in mind that when the door is closed forcefully, it causes the hinge to warp or loosens the screws.
Other issues can be a warping of the door itself, which is not uncommon with wooden doors. You can check if this is the case by getting an object with a long, flat edge and hold it up against the door to see if it is even the whole way.
Sometimes the holes through which the screws fasten the hinges to the cabinet can be misaligned and so you can use a ruler to ensure that the mounting holes in the cabinet wall are all the same distance from the front edge of the cabinet. In this case, it would be better to contact IKEA to look at getting a replacement rather than trying to redrill the holes.
Another issue is that the spring inside the hinges needs adjusting. This can be adjusted by finding the screw inside the hinge and using quarter turns to minutely tighten up the internal spring.
How to Adjust IKEA Cabinet Doors – Step by Step
You can adjust the screws on the hinge to move the closet door horizontally, vertically and on the axis towards the closet. Generally, the hinges should be symmetrical so make adjustments to get them as close to mirroring each other as you can. If the issue is a bent hinge, you may have to loosen screws to balance out the other side’s door.
First you want to identify that there are two sets of screws. One set is holding the hinge to the cabinet door and generally, you won’t want to adjust these. The screws you most likely need to adjust are on the hinge themselves and not connected to the actual cabinet doors. These are the screws that allow adjustments to be made to help align the cabinet doors.
Second, look at the cabinet and determine what the issue is. Is the door hanging unevenly? Do you need to align it with the edge better? Once you have determined this, lay the cabinet on its side so that the cabinet door, when open, is lying on a flat surface which will allow you easier access to the hinges without also having to hold the door open.
Next you want to try making small adjustments to one of the three adjustment screws and then close the cabinet door to see if this is closer to what you want the end product to be. If it has caused a different alignment issue, just reverse what you did to the same screw and try another.
It may also be that the internal spring tension is too loose, which causes the doors to not stay closed, or too tight, which causes the doors to spring open.
To adjust the internal spring tension, hold open the door and you should see two screws on each hinge. Often these are slightly recessed into the body of the hinge. Clockwise turning on a screw will tighten it up (righty-tighty, lefty loosey). Use one-quarter turns at a time to add tension to the internal spring. Test the door. If it still won’t stay closed, try some additional quarter turns.
For doors that won’t close, try quarter turns to the left instead.
How Do You Fix a Misaligned Cabinet Door?
Misalignment is mostly going to come from hinges that are not seated correctly, are bent or need some adjusting. Things to look out for are the gaps between doors as they should all be even with the doors next to and surrounding them if the cabinet was constructed properly. Measuring the gaps can help you narrow down which door or hinge is causing the issue.
Sometimes the issue is that the wall or floor that the cabinet is near is not straight and this makes it look like the cabinet is the culprit when in fact you have an uneven floor or wall. Using a laser level is one of the most accurate ways to detect these types of irregularities.
