Making Cabinet Doors: A Shop-Tested DIY Guide

Making cabinet doors is one of the most satisfying jobs in woodworking, and it’s far more approachable than most people think. A set of shaker doors for a whole kitchen can be built over a couple of weekends with a table saw, a router, and a few hundred dollars in lumber. Get the sizing math right and the joinery clean, and your doors will look every bit as good as a $700-per-linear-foot custom order.

This guide covers the three main styles, the tools and materials you need, and a full worked example for a shaker door — including the overlay deduction that trips up first-timers.

Pick Your Door Style

Three styles cover 95% of cabinets:

• Shaker: a flat recessed panel inside a square-edged frame of four pieces (two rails, two stiles). Timeless, forgiving, and the best starting point.
• Flat/slab: a single flat panel, usually 3/4-inch plywood or MDF with edge banding. The easiest door to make — no frame joinery at all — and the modern go-to.
• Raised panel: a shaped, contoured center panel in a profiled frame. The most traditional look, but it demands a router table and a raised-panel bit set, so save it for after you’ve built a few shakers.

Tools and Materials

For frame-and-panel doors you’ll want:

• Table saw with a good crosscut sled or miter gauge — this does most of the work.
• Router table and a rail-and-stile (cope-and-stick) bit set ($80–$180 for a matched pair). This cuts the interlocking profile and the panel groove in one setup.
• A slot cutter or dado stack as an alternative to a full stile-and-rail set for simple shakers. A 1/4-inch dado plus a pocket-hole jig is the true budget path — no router table required, though the joint is less refined.
• Clamps (parallel or pipe), wood glue, sandpaper (120 through 220 grit), and a moisture-tolerant finish.
• Optional but great: a 35mm Forstner bit for boring European hinge cups.

For materials, use straight, quarter-sawn hardwood like maple, poplar (if painting), or white oak for the frames. Panels can be 1/4-inch plywood for shaker recesses or MDF for a paint-grade slab. Poplar is my favorite paint-grade frame wood — cheap, stable, and it machines clean.

A word on material selection at the lumberyard: buy your frame stock a week ahead and let it acclimate in your shop before milling. Wood that comes straight off a cold truck and gets cut the same day will move on you overnight, throwing off the flat frames you worked so hard to clamp square. Pick boards that are flat and free of twist — sight down each one like a pool cue — and set aside anything with a knot near a joint line. For a full kitchen of shaker doors you’ll typically go through 40 to 60 board feet of frame stock, so buy 15 percent extra to cull the bad pieces.

The Sizing Formula (Read This Twice)

Nearly every door failure I see comes from bad math, not bad woodworking. The critical concept is overlay — how far the door covers the cabinet opening. Standard half-overlay face-frame cabinets use a 1/2-inch overlay on each side, which means the door is 1 inch wider and 1 inch taller than the opening.

The core formulas:

• Door width = opening width + (2 × overlay)
• Door height = opening height + (2 × overlay)
• Rail length = door width − (2 × stile width) + (2 × tenon/tongue depth)

A Worked Example

Say your cabinet opening measures 12 inches wide by 24 inches tall, with a 1/2-inch overlay all around and 2-1/4-inch-wide stiles and rails (a common shaker proportion). Your rail-and-stile bit cuts a 3/8-inch-deep tongue and groove.

1. Door width: 12 + (2 × 0.5) = 13 inches. That’s the 1-inch total deduction working in reverse — the opening plus 1 inch.
2. Door height: 24 + (2 × 0.5) = 25 inches.
3. Stiles: cut two at the full door height, 25 inches long × 2-1/4 inches wide.
4. Rails: door width 13 − (2 × 2.25 stiles) = 8.5, then + (2 × 0.375 tongues) = 9.25 inches long each. Cut two.
5. Panel: the space between the grooves plus the groove depth, minus 1/8 inch total for seasonal wood movement. For this door, roughly 9-3/8 inches wide by 21-3/8 inches tall in 1/4-inch plywood.

Always cut one test door from scrap first and dry-fit it in the opening before running the whole batch.

Assembly Step by Step

1. Machine the stick (groove) profile on the inside edge of all four frame pieces at the router table.
2. Switch to the cope (matching) profile and cut the ends of the two rails only. Use a backer block to prevent tear-out.
3. Dry-fit the frame around the panel to confirm your numbers. The panel should float — never glue it in, or it will crack when the wood moves.
4. Apply glue to the cope-and-stick joints only (rails to stiles), insert the panel dry, and clamp square. Check diagonals — they must match within 1/16 inch.
5. Let it cure an hour, scrape squeeze-out, then sand flush from 120 up to 220 grit.

Finishing, Hinges, and Boring

Finish before hanging. For paint-grade poplar or MDF, prime with a bonding primer and spray two coats of a durable cabinet enamel like Benjamin Moore Advance. For stain-grade oak or maple, use a wipe-on poly or a catalyzed lacquer — at least three thin coats, sanding lightly between with 320 grit.

For hinges, concealed European (Blum or Grass) cup hinges are the standard. Bore a 35mm cup hole 3/8 inch from the door edge with a Forstner bit — a $30 hinge-boring jig makes this foolproof. Bore about 4 inches from the top and bottom of the door for a standard two-hinge setup; add a third hinge in the middle for any door taller than 40 inches or heavier than about 12 pounds. Set the hinge, mount the plate to the cabinet, and use the built-in three-way adjustment screws to dial in perfectly even reveals.

Set your reveals — the gap around each door — at a consistent 1/8 inch. That’s tight enough to look built-in but loose enough that doors don’t rub as seasons change. Use plastic spacer shims or a couple of stacked playing cards to hold the gap while you drive the mounting screws, and always hang the door before the drawer fronts so you can align everything to one another. Take your time on the first pair; once your eye is calibrated, the rest of the run goes fast.

A few habits will save you grief on a full batch. Label the back of every part with its opening number the moment it’s cut, because a stack of 30 similar rails becomes chaos fast. Cut all your stiles at one saw setting and all your rails at another, so identical parts are truly identical rather than drifting by a sixteenth. And keep a running cut list on paper or a spreadsheet with the opening size, overlay, and finished door size for each cabinet — you’ll reference it a dozen times, and it’s your paper trail when something doesn’t fit.

Expect the first door to take an hour or two while you fuss with setups; once the router bits and saw stops are dialed in, you can batch out a door every 15 to 20 minutes. Doing a whole kitchen’s worth of shaker doors yourself typically saves several thousand dollars over a custom shop, which is real money for a couple of weekends of work.

That’s the whole process. Making cabinet doors rewards precision over speed: measure the opening twice, respect the overlay, build one test door, and the rest of the batch will drop into place. Once you’ve built a run of shakers, slab and raised-panel doors are just variations on the same fundamentals you’ve already mastered.