Base Corner Cabinet Door Options

[Mike Goetzke]

I need to make the doors for our base corner cabinet. Looking at the big box stores I see two options being used: 1) Two doors, one hinged to the other and one hinged to the face frame. 2) the other I have seen is the two door permanently fixed to each other (at 90 deg) and this assembly fastened to the lazy Susan. Any experience on which design works best in practice?

Thanks

(The rest of my cabinets are faceframe w/ overlapped doors.)

[JohnT Fitzgerald]

Mike - I've had both types. I think I prefer the hinged door approach, versus the doors attached to the lazy susan. I have 2 reasons for this:

1. Hinged doors allow having large fixed shelves in the corner unit, which enables the rotating shelf to be mounted to large lazy-suzan bases for the rotating part. These can often be very heavy duty, and hold up well to heavy loads. On the other hand, when the doors are fixed to the lazy susan, there is no way to use fixed shelves, and the rotating shelves are usuall attached to a center rod instead of a wider bearing base. This tends to have issues with heavier loads (think 5 lb bags of sugar, boxes of baking soda, etc). This is my experience with commercial cabinets - I do not know if it is common with custom cabinets.

2. Hinged doors can better match the rest of a kitchen which has overlapped doors on the rest of the cabinets. Attached doors leave a gap between the door and the FF - not a functional issue, but it is "different".

[Shawn Pixley]

Depending upon style there is a third option. With full overlay doors and drawers (frameless cabinet construction) they can be individually hinged and one door overlays the other. My corner cabinets are that way.

[Jeff Monson]

If you have face frame construction now, I'd go with the hinged door. We have 2 in our kitchen and they work fine. I'm doing a kitchen project in my shop right now (face frame), one corner will get 2 doors hinged. I use Blum 60 degree clip top hinges for the center hinge. The other corner is going to be the space saver drawer system, looking forward to making this cabinet as its a new venture for me.

[John TenEyck]

Hinged doors just look better to me, more like the rest of the cabinets. I've used a couple of different types. The last time I used a Blum hinge between the two doors and a Salice hinge set to the faceframe. Both worked very well, very robust, and were easy to adjust.

[Mike Goetzke]

Thanks for the replies I too think the hinged doors look more like my 1/2 OL doors. Now to hunt for hinges.

Mike