DIY Soft Close Cabinet Doors {With Video!}

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

Tired of your drawers slamming shut when the kids are using them? Do your drawers become a mess every time the drawer slams because stuff moves around inside? 

There's an EASY fix for this that only takes a few minutes to install. I share a video on the installation in this post!

Did you know you can add soft close dampers to your bathroom or kitchen cabinet doors? This is a great way to update basic stock cabinets. 

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 cabinet door hinges with these soft close options instead. As long as you know how to use a screwdriver or drill, this is a really easy update: They come with a tiny damper installed inside. Typically these are a little spendy (although the price really has dropped over the years). 

You'll need to adjust these to make your door spacing/opening the same as how you had it before. See those little screws on the left side of the hinge? 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 damper to slide the screw through for installation. 

I recommend predrilling the hole for your screw first. 

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

That's it for the install! 

One more thing though, 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. ;) 

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: