Deep breaths and a cuppa tea.

Somebody had to have spec'd the door sizes for the door company and I would be calmly asking both sets of people who developed the door list, check the measurements of the doors to the list and see what happened. You never know, they may be someone else's doors.

The doors may be mis-manufactured. The cabinets may be the wrong sizes. You may be holding the door up against the wrong cabinet. The door maker's rep might have spec'd the doors for partial overlay.

There should be detailed cabinet plans - meaning plans of how each cabinet was to be built. If you have a set, check a cabinet frame or two. If the cabinets are framed, is the frame installed yet? The doors would not touch side to side, there would be a little clearance.

You might try asking the carpenter fellow to help you find the problem with how it fits together.

Yours won't be the first order to need some doors remade - I can guarantee that!

I guess I don't understand why the cabinets are being constructed in two different phases by two different guys. That's not how custom cabinets are done. THis sounds like you had the cabinets made to fit presized catalog doors rather than actual custom made doors and custom made boxes. And having two people involved doubles the chance for an error.

The person responsible for the error is the person who measured. Since you have 2 people measuring two different jobs, it's up to the GC of the project to coordinate those guys and make sure they're on the same page---which obviously should have been done before things were costructed and ordered. If you're doing the finishing, I suspect that you may be acting as GC on the job rather than going through a professional. The doors ultimately can be reorderd, or the boxes remade. Either choice is an expensive lesson to be learned. Measuring twice and cutting once isnt' just an axiom! Homeowners learn that lesson too, unfortunately.

If I'm wrong about you GCing the job yourself, then the first phone call you make is to your GC and throw the problem in his lap for him to solve. It's what you pay him for!

They touch vertically, but not horizontally.

How wide is the gap? Keep in mind that there must be some space between doors on the hinge side for them to swing open properly.

It sounds like you are going with a custom company who hires out different parts of their cabinetry. And there is significant debate here whether that's truly custom or not, but that debate is totally irrelevant to your problem.

My custom people do it the same way. One company makes their boxes, one makes their doors, and the husband part of the team is the one who orders, coordinates, installs, and makes any little thing that the homeowner can dream turn into reality via working with the various makers of the various peices. (Thus it's custom).

However, the person who is handling this coordination process is responsible for getting the details correct. Absolutely correct. If he ordered the doors, he should make sure they are exactly the right size. If something is "off" then he needs to tweak one of the pieces to make it perfect, whether that be the doors or the boxes.

Let me give you one example of this. My custom company just branced into inset cabinetry - mine is the first kitchen with a few inset pieces. My cab guy ordered 32" doors for a particular piece, but didn't account for the extra framing that inset has on the top and bottom so that raises my counter height for this peice to 40". I wanted it to be the standard 36" like the rest of the counter. He called, asked me if 40" was acceptable, I said no, so he is eating the cost of the the 2 doors for this piece. I feel bad for him, but unfortunately that is the cost of doing business, and we all know (him included) that he is responsible for ordering correctly.

If something is happening that wasn't agreed up, your cabinet guy needs to fix it.

The problem might arise if it wasn't very specifically outlined that this was going to be full overlay - and questioning up front as to what exactly full overlay meant to him, seeing an example of what his full overlay looked like, etc.

I asked my cabinet people up front what the biggest gap b/w doors would be (as they are full overlay) and they said less than 1/8", and I saw their work so I knew there would be no chance of it going anywhere toward the direction of partial overlay. Did you have these conversations up front?

On the same cabinet, we have just under 1/4" b/w drawers and just under 1/8" b/w doors.

There's just under 1/4" b/w a door or drawer and the edge of the cabinet...so a little over 3/8" b/w drawers on adjacent cabinets. (I don't have two door'd cabinets of the same depth together to measure that gap, but I suspect it would be the same.) Note that this 1/4" or so acts as "filler" to allow all doors to open completely w/o having to add real filler and waste space.

My upper cabinets are mixed depths next to each other, no two are the same depth. With varied depths, some filler is needed b/w cabinets to allow the shallower cabinet to open completely. I have 3/8" filler b/w the shallower cabinets and the deeper cabinets next to them on the shallower cabinets' hinged sides.

Hi, lindamarie, just wondering if you'd gotten any more answers re: your cabs...