How To Easily Make Any Cabinet Door Soft Close {With Video} | Thrifty Decor Chick

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.

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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: 

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

This is what they look like:

They cost less than $3 each if you purchase them in multiples. The great thing is, you only need one per door, unlike the door hinges I shared at the beginning of this post. 

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:

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?