DIY Soft Close Cabinet Doors {With Video!}

How to easily make cabinets doors soft close in just a few minutes. 

Tired of your doors slamming shut when the kids are in the kitchen? :) There's an EASY fix for this that only takes a few minutes to install. 

Did you know you can switch your basic cabinet doors to soft close cabinets by adding these dampers to your bathroom or kitchen cabinet doors? This is a great way to upgrade basic stock cabinets. 

I share an installation video later in this post!

Every time we used to walk through IKEA I would open and shut the cabinet doors to see the magic of the soft close door. I never thought I would have them in our house, because replacing each and every hinge in our home wasn't going to happen.

You CAN replace all of your compact cabinet door hinges with these soft close hinges instead. These are used on face frame cabinets like ours that have the extra trim around the front of the cabinet: 

As long as you know how to use a screwdriver or power drill, this is a really easy update. The new hinges come with a tiny soft close mechanism installed inside. 

**You'll want to use a different type of hinge if you have frameless cabinets, that have no front trim. These soft close euro hinges will work for that type of cabinet!

Typically these are a little spendy (although the price has dropped over the years). 

If you use these self closing hinges, you'll need to adjust these to make your door spacing/opening uniform across all of your cabinets. 

See those little adjustment screws on the left side of the hinge above? You can tighten or loosen those to change the following: 

• The height of each door (you'll want this to match across all of your cabinets.)
• The depth -- so how far you want your cabinet doors to hang away from the frames.
• The side to side measurements. You can move your doors to the left or right so they close tighter together or further apart. 

It's not difficult to make these adjustments, just a little time consuming and tedious. 

If your cabinet doors aren't level, or are hitting each other, try adjusting those screws!

Thankfully there's an easier answer for soft close doors at the hardware store. I was GIDDY the day I first time I came across these years ago!

These are soft close dampers you can buy in a package or individually. 

This is what they look like:

The great thing is, you only need one per door, unlike the door hinges. 

The installation is SUPER easy. They go inside the cabinet like so, with a bit of the edge hanging over:

There's a hole in the side of the cabinet door damper to slide the screw through for installation. 

I recommend predrilling your screw holes with a drill bit first. 

This makes installation a lot easier and makes sure the frame doesn’t split. Each soft close adapter only needs one screw.

That's it for the install! 

One more thing though, you'll want to try out your door to see how it closes. 

If it doesn't close soft enough for your liking, you can move the damper by adjusting the back screw:

You can extend it for heavier doors or make it shorter for lighter doors that need less "damping." 

That's the technical term you know. ;) 

You may have to play with it a bit till your door closes like you want. 

This soft close option have been especially helpful for us because I use stock cabinets for so many of my bookcase builds:

See our giant entertainment center build here!

They are inexpensive and don't come with any of the cool options that more expensive cabinets have. 

For my recent pantry project, I used an option from the Rockler store just because I was impatient and didn't want to wait the day for a delivery. 😂

Here’s a quick video on how to install, and you can see how the doors close after installation: