How To Easily Make Any Cabinet Door Soft Close {With Video}

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

Tired of your cabinet doors slamming shut? 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: 

 

If 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.

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 came across these years ago!

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

This is what they look like:

The installation is SUPER easy. They go inside the cabinet in the corner, 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 pre-drilling your screw holes with a drill bit to prevent splitting.  

Pre-drilling makes installation a lot easier! Each soft close adapter only needs one screw.

That's it for the install! 

Once installed, 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 twist 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." 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!

Tour my DIY office makeover.

They are inexpensive and don't come with any of the details like soft close that more expensive cabinets have. 

For my huge pantry makeover, 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:

Those pantry doors are tall and heavy, so I may add one more damper at the bottom of each one. But on standard doors, one is more than enough to create that slow motion. 

When you do this it feels so luxurious…all fancy-like. It takes some getting used to – for a while you'll try to shut the doors. We had to remind ourselves to chilllll and let the damper do its job. 😁

These dampers are only for cabinet doors -- I tried adding them to drawers but they didn't work. I ended up installing these full extending soft close drawer slides to our pantry drawers: 

I love sharing little finds like this that work well – have you tried these door dampers in your home? 

See more of our home and shop items in each room here.

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