A cabinet door isn’t a product you pull off a shelf in a size that happens to fit. It’s made to the box it hangs on. So the honest answer to where you buy replacement doors and drawer fronts starts somewhere else entirely, with how your existing cabinets are built, how the old fronts sit on them, and what’s already drilled into the back.
Nail those down and plenty of shops will sell you fronts. Miss them and you’ll own a stack of wood that won’t close right.
The upside is real, though. A fronts-only project leaves your kitchen usable the whole time. No demo, no boxed-up dishes, no countertop coming off. You’re buying fronts and hinges instead of boxes, so the number lands under new cabinetry by definition.
Your Existing Boxes Decide What You Can Order
Four specs turn a vague cabinet door search into an order a supplier can fill. All four come off cabinets you already own, and you can gather them yourself with a tape measure and a phone camera.
Face frame or frameless
Open any door and look at the front edge of the cabinet. If a flat wood frame runs around the opening, usually an inch and a half wide, you have face-frame cabinets. That’s the traditional American build. If the opening is just the raw edges of the box sides with nothing across them, that’s frameless, sometimes called European or full-access.
This one fact rules out roughly half the hinges on the market for you. The two constructions take different hardware, and the sizing math differs too. Tell a supplier the wrong one and everything downstream is wrong.
How much frame the door is meant to cover
Overlay is how much cabinet a front hides. Full overlay leaves only a thin reveal and reads as a seamless modern run. Standard overlay lets a half inch or so of face frame show. Inset is tightest, with the door flush inside the frame rather than on top of it.
Measure what you have before you fall in love with something else. Changing overlay changes the size of every front in the kitchen, and usually the hinges too. Inset is least forgiving, because it needs square, consistent openings. In older Nashville houses that have moved since they were built, openings drift. A reveal running a sixteenth wider at one end of a door is invisible at full overlay and glaring on inset.
The hinges, and the holes already bored for them
Most fronts built in the last few decades are bored for a concealed cup hinge: a 35mm round recess near each corner of the back edge, with two screw holes beside it. Older kitchens often have surface-mount or wraparound hinges screwed straight to the face frame, with no boring at all.
Reusing your hinges means new fronts have to be bored to match: cup size, how far the cup sits in from the door edge, screw spacing. And upgrading to soft-close concealed hardware on face-frame boxes takes hinges built for face frames specifically. Photograph the back of one door before you talk to anybody. A picture answers more than a paragraph of description will.
Sizes, measured to the sixteenth
On overlay cabinets you measure the existing fronts, not the openings. Height first, then width, to the nearest sixteenth of an inch. Then do it again on every single one.
Don’t assume a run is uniform. Cabinets get built to fill a specific wall, so the last box in a row is frequently an odd width and a corner unit is often its own animal. Note which doors are hinged left and which are hinged right, and mark any front already drilled for a pull.
Where Replacement Doors and Drawer Fronts Actually Come From
With those four specs in hand, the supply routes open up. They differ mostly in how much of the matching problem they solve for you.
The original cabinet manufacturer
Look for a label or stamp inside a door or on the side of a drawer box. If the line is still in production, ordering the same door in the same species and finish is the cleanest match available. Discontinued lines are common, though, and a finish that’s had a decade of kitchen light on it won’t match a new one exactly.
A custom cabinet door shop
These build to your dimensions and your boring pattern, in whatever style and species you name. It’s the flexible route, and the one that absorbs odd sizes without complaint. You wait longer, and the accuracy of the numbers you hand over is on you.
A refacing program through a kitchen dealer
New fronts plus matching veneer applied over the existing face frames and exposed box sides, so old and new read as one kitchen instead of two. The finish-matching problem, which is what quietly ruins most self-managed door swaps, gets handled as part of the job.
Ready-made stock sizes
Cheapest per piece, and fine when your openings land on standard increments and you’re re-boring anyway. That’s a narrower window than most people expect.
Unfinished fronts let you color-match on site, but a factory finish holds up better than anything sprayed in a garage. Settle the choice between a stained and a painted finish before you choose a species, because paint buries grain and stain sells it.
One check that costs you nothing: if the fronts are MDF or plywood from a seller you don’t know, ask for the compliance label. Composite wood products sold in the United States have to be labeled as compliant with the federal formaldehyde emission standard, and a supplier who can’t produce that paperwork is telling you something.
There’s a fifth path people reach for: refinishing what’s already hanging. Worth knowing before the sander comes out. If the house went up before 1978, painted surfaces may contain lead, and federal rules require that anyone paid to do work disturbing painted surfaces in a home that old be certified under the EPA’s lead-safe renovation program.
Plenty of Middle Tennessee housing stock predates that line. Ask whoever you hire whether they hold it.
What Happens Between the Order and the Install
Somebody verifies the measurements before anything gets cut. On a professionally handled job that’s a field measure: every opening counted, every front measured, overlay and hinge spec written down in one place. The count is where these projects go sideways more often than the measurements are. It’s easy to forget the two narrow doors under a sink.
Then comes the sample. Approve a finished piece in your own kitchen, in your own light, held against the frames it has to live beside. Showroom lighting is generous. North-facing kitchen light in February is not.
Lead time depends on the route you picked. Stock sizes ship quickly. Custom work is measured in weeks, and a specialty finish adds to that.
Install is the short part. Old fronts and hinges come off, new hinges go in, everything gets hung, then everything gets adjusted. That last step matters more than it sounds. A concealed hinge moves in three directions, and whether a kitchen reads factory-built or homemade comes down to somebody patiently evening out reveals.
One thing to settle before you order: drawer fronts come in two kinds. An applied front unscrews from inside the drawer box and swaps out easily. A one-piece front, where the front of the box is the face you see, can’t be changed without a new drawer box. Pull a drawer out and look.
If you’d rather hand off the measuring and the matching, that’s what a designer-led kitchen remodeling plan is for. The spec gets settled before anything is ordered, not after it arrives wrong.
What You Handle and What a Shop Handles
A fronts-only project splits cleanly down the middle. Knowing which side of that line you want to stand on is most of the decision.
| You handle | A kitchen dealer handles |
|---|---|
| Deciding the layout stays as it is | Confirming the boxes are sound enough to carry new fronts |
| Choosing style, species, and finish direction | Matching that finish across new fronts, old face frames, and exposed box sides |
| Living with the cabinet interiors you already have | Field-measuring every opening and recording the hinge spec |
| Saying whether you want soft-close | Specifying hinges that suit a face-frame or a frameless box |
| Clearing counters on install day | Boring, hanging, and adjusting every hinge to an even reveal |
Guthrie runs both replacement and refacing out of the Pleasant View showroom, which matters for an unglamorous reason. When both routes are genuinely on the table, “should I keep these boxes?” stops being a sales question. Sound boxes under a layout that works are worth keeping.
Sagging shelves, a sink base that’s been wet for years, or a floor plan you’ve resented for a decade are not problems new fronts will fix.
What Moves the Number and the Calendar
No two of these projects price the same way, but the variables are short and predictable.
- Opening count. This is the multiplier. A tight galley and a wraparound U-shape aren’t the same project even when the door style is identical.
- Material and finish. Paint-grade MDF, a hardwood species, and a multi-step specialty finish sit at different levels.
- Whether the hinges change. Reusing existing boring costs less than re-boring, and switching hinge systems entirely costs more than either.
- Whether the frames get refaced too. New fronts against sun-faded face frames look exactly like new fronts against sun-faded face frames.
- Odd sizes. One or two out-of-standard openings can push an entire order from stock to custom.
On the calendar, the order is the long pole and the install is short. Your kitchen keeps working throughout, which is the real argument for this route over new cabinetry. If you’re building a kitchen remodel budget from scratch instead, the split between boxes, fronts, and hardware is worth understanding before you decide which of the two you’re actually buying.
Frequently Asked Questions Before You Order
Can I replace just the doors and keep my existing cabinets?
Usually yes, and that’s the whole point of the approach. The test is the boxes, not the fronts. Press on a few shelves, check whether the sink base has swollen from old leaks, and see whether the boxes are still square and solidly fastened. Sound boxes plus a layout you like means new fronts will work.
Will new fronts match the finish on the rest of my cabinets?
Not on their own. New wood next to a decade-old face frame reads as two different kitchens even when the color code is identical, because finishes shift with light and age. Refacing exists to solve exactly this, by veneering the frames and exposed sides in the same finish as the new fronts.
What if some of my openings are odd sizes?
Then stock is off the table and you’re ordering custom. That’s common in older homes and in any kitchen where cabinets were built to fill a specific wall. It’s a fork in the road rather than a problem, moving you to a route that builds to your numbers instead of a catalog.
Do I need to replace the drawer boxes too?
Only if your drawer fronts are one-piece. When the front unscrews from inside the drawer, the box stays and you’re swapping the face alone. Pull a drawer out and look at the inside of its front before you assume it goes either way.
Not Sure What Your Boxes Will Take?
Bring photos. The back of one door, the inside of one drawer, the face frame around an opening, and a wide shot of the room answer most of what a designer needs to tell you whether new fronts will work. Guthrie designs and builds kitchens across Nashville and Middle Tennessee, and the same showroom conversation covers replacement and refacing, so the recommendation isn’t limited to whichever one is easier to sell.
Start with a kitchen design consultation and get the spec settled before anything gets ordered.