Inset doors in out of square openings

[Michael Weber]

Planing on replacing some overlay kitchen cabinet doors with inset doors. I want a beaded edge door which I was going to build using a mitered corner so I could route the bead in the edge before assembly. Today I was measuring the upper door openings and it seems the stiles are not really vertical. The worst is about 3/8 out of plumb over 36 inches. The best is enough to mess up the edge reveal around a square door. A few solutions other than building out of square doors come to mind but are all time consuming and fiddley. I'd be interested in hearing solutions from anyone who has done this or anyone with an idea on the best way to proceed. If necessary I can use applied beads to the door edge but prefer not to. Thanks

[John TenEyck]

I've never done it but I can think of a couple of options. One might be to make a fixture that would allow you to route the faceframes square and true. You would have to clean up the corners by hand but that wouldn't be too much work. If there's not enough room for the router (although palm routers are pretty small) to do that then I guess I'd consider removing and replacing the faceframe with a new one. Besides being square another advantage is that you could have one faceframe for the whole run of cabinets with no joints between boxes. I would avoid making out of square doors if at all possible.

John

[Max Neu]

I think it's going to be too tedious to try to build out of square doors for every opening. I would consider adding the bead to the face frame openings.

[Peter Quinn]

I think it's going to be too tedious to try to build out of square doors for every opening. I would consider adding the bead to the face frame openings.


This is the only sensible option I can think of. Apply bead to the face frames, DO NOT do mitered doors for botched openings, this doesn't work, make regular stile and rail cope and stick doors, make them a little big so you can trim them to for the out of square opening. Probably easier to hinge them first if using butt hinges, you can fit them first if using euro cup hinges. But trying to make a mitered door with a bead around the perimeter fit a grossly out of square opening is somewhere between difficult and impossible. Mitered doors with profiles like to be 90 degree corners, and they like to fit in square openings.

If its paint grade you could rip tapered shims and glue/nail these in place then sand flush to fix the openings, but that will be hard to get a perfect surface on the exterior.

[Robert Engel]

You can do it.

First, build the doors and dry fit them together (miter spline?)
Then cut/trim/hand plane to fit face frame geometry.
Then route the bead
Then glue up.

It is a pain yes, but it will be worth it in the end because inset doors will show off your craftsmanship much more than an overlay.
(I think the purpose of overlay is to hide the unevenness of the frames anyway).

Hope this suggestion helps.

[J.R. Rutter]

+1 for applying bead to inside of face frames (assuming you don't want to remake them completely.)

[Martin Wasner]

Fit one corner of the door so it fits tightly with an edge sander, scribe the other two edges the same way using a compass/scriber to make your marks. I do it every single day as most of my jobs are inset. I'm incapable of building a perfectly square door or a perfectly square opening. It's pretty quick and painless once you get good at it, I can fit ten to fifteen doors in an hour.

[Max Neu]

Fit one corner of the door so it fits tightly with an edge sander, scribe the other two edges the same way using a compass/scriber to make your marks. I do it every single day as most of my jobs are inset. I'm incapable of building a perfectly square door or a perfectly square opening. It's pretty quick and painless once you get good at it, I can fit ten to fifteen doors in an hour.
That's how most people would go about it if they were square edged doors,but since he want's a beaded edge,that throws a wrench into the plan.

[Martin Wasner]

That's how most people would go about it if they were square edged doors,but since he want's a beaded edge,that throws a wrench into the plan.

I didn't see they were mitred doors. Good luck, the effort won't be worth the end product, but I have a deep seated, outright hatred for mitred doors.

[Peter Quinn]

I didn't see they were mitred doors. Good luck, the effort won't be worth the end product, but I have a deep seated, outright hatred for mitred doors.

Ive seen them look ok on full over lay, usually a bit busy for my personal aesthetic preferences, but not usually see them on full inset, at least the ones with the highly molded profiles like picture frames. It's very traditional to cock bead drawer fronts on furniture, but that's a very time consuming process. As a cabinet maker I hate dealing with picture frame doors, just not a good practical functional match for full inset cabinetry. No adjustability post construction. Ouch.

[Patrice Nesbitt]

Planing on replacing some overlay kitchen cabinet doors with inset doors. I want a beaded edge door which I was going to build using a mitered corner so I could route the bead in the edge before assembly. Today I was measuring the upper door openings and it seems the stiles are not really vertical. The worst is about 3/8 out of plumb over 36 inches. The best is enough to mess up the edge reveal around a square door. A few solutions other than building out of square doors come to mind but are all time consuming and fiddley. I'd be interested in hearing solutions from anyone who has done this or anyone with an idea on the best way to proceed. If necessary I can use applied beads to the door edge but prefer not to. Thanks


My husband was a master carpenter and his recommendation would be not to match the stiles but to replace the stiles. If you are able to remove the cabinets to work on them, it would be easier to do this. His suggestion was to cut out the existing botched up stiles and make new ones that are right and then make your doors.

[Pat Barry]

The beaded insert for the opening makes no sense to me for the size gaps you are indicating. I can't see how this could possibly look good. Maybe I'm not following. Why not go with an overlay replacement. Note - the worst stiles might need a tapered add on to reduce the gaps. You might even have enough success with a tapered addon piece to do your inset doors. If that's what people are getting at with the bead idea then sorry for not understanding.

[Michael Weber]

Thanks for all the ideas. These are built on site cabinets and solid. Impossible to remove short of destruction and the face frame is glued on. They will be repainted so patching is possible. As an old cabinet maker once told me "a good coat of paint hides a thousand sins" :) I'm considering all the suggestions and one way or another or with a combination I'll make it work. Thanks again

[Phil Thien]

The only Q I have is, if you stand back a few feet and look at a stile that is off 3/8" top to bottom, do you notice it?

I'd think it would scream out, and I imagine a door attached to such a stile isn't going to want to stay in place when opened (either wanting to open all the way, or close). And the door would look crooked, too.

3/8" seems like a lot.

[Kelby Van Patten]

I agree with Phil. If stiles are 3/8" out of plumb from top to bottom, there's no way to make that look good except to cover it up with overlay doors. That will be very noticeable.

Tweaking inset doors with a block plane to get a good fit is normal, but we're talking about 1/16" - 1/8" of tweaking at most. 3/8" out of plumb is a lot. Unless you plan to square up the openings, I think you're going to put a lot of effort into something that can't possibly look right when it's done.

[roger wiegand]

Agree that if they are that far off they are probably not going to look good with inset doors. However if I were going to do it I'd make an oversize square door, scribe it to the opening less the width of the bead, plane it to the scribed, out of square shape, than attach the bead.

[Tom Ewell]

Any reason you can't overlay an entire new face frame with fitted doors to the existing, hide the old, maybe trim the old down some so when the doors are open it will diminish the obvious cover up.

[Michael Weber]

This is the current plan. First, cover the exposed cabinet sides with thin plywood or make false panels. Then I'm going to resaw solid wood to 1/8 inch and recover the rails and stiles. I'll use wide enough strips to cover up any out of plumb stiles, fill in with wood behind the overlay and use a trim router with a top bearing to trim the fill flush with the overlay and square corners with a chisel. Anyone foresee a problem?

[johnny means]

Fit one corner of the door so it fits tightly with an edge sander, scribe the other two edges the same way using a compass/scriber to make your marks. I do it every single day as most of my jobs are inset. I'm incapable of building a perfectly square door or a perfectly square opening. It's pretty quick and painless once you get good at it, I can fit ten to fifteen doors in an hour.

You do this professionally?

[Martin Wasner]

I'm assuming because I said I can not build a perfectly square door or opening you question that. I mean perfectly square. I run a 3/32" margin, I over size the doors a bit about a 1/16" in width and a 1/32" in height, and just scribe then in with the edge sander. Pulling a tape on any given door, I'm likely less than the width of the line on the tape out of square, so less than 1/64"?

I don't build everything that goes through the shop either. I don't control a stile being a few thousandths big or any of the other hundred factors that can make a door or opening not perfect.

But they're perfect when they go out the door. (Until the temperature changes anyways.....)

[Kevin Woodhead]

Not sure if this will work for your situation, but I'd rather fit the face frames to the doors rather than the other way around. I'd make a square template to fit my square/mitered/beaded doors + the reveal I wanted, then clamp it to the face frame opening and rout it square, finishing out the corners with a chisel. Of course if you have many different sized openings and doors this might get tedious.