Article: How to Install Cabinet Knobs, Cabinet Handles & Pulls
How to Install Cabinet Knobs, Cabinet Handles & Pulls
Swapping cabinet hardware is one of the few changes you can make to a kitchen in an afternoon and still notice a year later. There is no trade skill in it — a tape measure, a screwdriver, and about half an hour for a run of doors.
The part that catches people out is not the fitting. It is the measurement you take before you order.
Before you order: measure the holes, not the handle
One measurement decides whether new hardware fits holes you already have, and it is not the one in the product title.
The overall length is the handle end to end — usually the size in the listing. The fixing centres are the distance from the centre of one screw hole to the centre of the other, and that is the number that has to match your door. Take the old handle off, measure across the two holes centre to centre, and buy to that. A knob has one screw and nothing to match.
Most of our hardware sits on the standard ladder, so if your kitchen was built in the last few decades it will line up. The exception worth checking is the 93 mm Vintage Arch, which uses 76 mm centres and falls between the standard steps.
Working out what size to buy in the first place is a bigger question than this page can carry — our drawer handle size guide has the chart that maps Australian cabinet widths to handle lengths and fixing centres, and it is the place to start if you are not simply matching existing holes.
What you will need
- Your new knobs, handles or pulls
- Tape measure and a pencil
- A screwdriver to suit the screws supplied with your hardware
- Power drill, if you are making new holes
- A piece of cardboard for a template, and some scrap timber to test on
- Masking tape
First, look at the screws in the box
This decides how you drill, and it is the step people skip. There are two kinds, they are easy to tell apart, and they want opposite holes.
Most cabinet hardware — knobs, D-handles and pulls that fix through the face of a door or drawer — comes with a machine screw. Some hardware fixes to the edge instead: our Simply Edge pulls ship with two countersunk wood screws and mount to the back or top edge rather than through the front.
On thread and length: our machine screws are M4, the metric standard used across Australian cabinet hardware. They ship at 25 mm, which suits the 18 mm door and drawer fronts used in most Australian kitchens. If your fronts are thicker than that, email us with the thickness before you start — we keep a 40 mm screw as well, and we will send whichever one actually suits your doors.
Fitting it
1. Take the old hardware off
Open the door or drawer and back the screws out from behind, catching the handle with your other hand as it comes free.
If your new hardware uses the same fixing centres, you are already most of the way there — skip to step 4.
2. Mark the new holes
If the centres do not match, or the cabinets are new, mark before you drill.
For a run of several, make a template. Take a piece of cardboard, square one corner to the corner of the door, mark your hole positions on it, and reuse it for every door in the run. Doing it by eye across ten drawers will show.
Not sure where the handle should sit? Stick it on with a blob of reusable putty and stand back before you mark anything. Where the handle goes, further down this page, covers the three positions that work on a drawer and why doors follow a different rule.
If you are planning a whole kitchen rather than one door, our free handle visualiser lets you lay hardware over your cabinet elevations and see how a run reads before you buy anything.
3. Drill
Size the bit against the screw you identified above. For our M4 machine screws that is a 4.5 mm bit, the standard clearance size for an M4 thread — the screw has to pass straight through the door without gripping it, so the hole is deliberately wider than the 4 mm thread itself. A 5 mm bit also works and is a little more forgiving if your two holes end up marked slightly out.
For a wood screw the rule reverses: go narrower than the thread, so the timber has something to bite into. Either way, drill a test hole in scrap and check it before you go near a door.
Two things that make the difference between a clean hole and a repair:
- Put masking tape over the mark. It stops the bit wandering and stops the finish chipping as the bit breaks through.
- Hold the door clear of the cabinet frame — or prop it with a folded towel — so you do not drill on into the carcass behind it.
4. Fit the new hardware
Push the screw through from the back, thread the handle on the front, and tighten by hand until it sits flush and square. Then a quarter turn with the screwdriver, and stop.
Over-tightening is the one thing that does real damage here. It crushes the board around the hole, and on a thin door it can split the front. Snug, not forced.
If the old holes are in the wrong place
Or if the old hardware left its mark. Handles and knobs that have been on a door for years tend to leave a ring of unfaded paint, and pulling them off can take a flake of finish with them. It is the same repair either way.
Three options, roughly in order of effort. Fill the holes with a wood filler matched to the door and touch up the finish. Fit a backplate, which sits between the door and the new hardware and covers both the old holes and any marked paint around them. Or choose replacement hardware that shares the same fixing centres — which is where measuring first pays for itself.
Where a screw sits proud at the back, or a drawer front wants a little extra support behind the hardware, our screw caps cover the exposed thread and tidy it up.
Where the handle goes
One last thing, and it is easier to settle before the holes are drilled than after. There is no single correct position — but there are three that turn up again and again on drawers, and doors follow a different logic entirely. It matters far less whether the thing in your hand is called a handle or a pull than where you decide to put it.
Three ways to sit a handle on a drawer
Centred. Halfway up the drawer front and halfway across. This is what most kitchens do, it is the position to choose if you are not sure, and it suits every door profile. On a wide drawer, two handles spaced evenly across the front look better than one stranded in the middle.
Up on the top rail. On a Shaker front the recessed panel sits with an even margin all the way around it — that does not change. What changes is the handle, which moves up out of the middle and into the rail along the top. It lifts the whole run visually, and it is a common choice in French provincial and country kitchens.
On the top edge. The hardware fixes at the very top of the drawer front, so it reads as a line between the drawers rather than an object sitting on them. This is where Simply Edge pulls and the Lip pull are designed to go — you catch the edge from above rather than gripping a bar in front of you.
Pulls that fix through the face of the drawer, like the Vintage Arch and the Half Moon, mount exactly the way a handle does — so the first two positions apply to them just as well.
Cupboard doors
Hardware on a door goes to the edge opposite the hinge, at the corner nearest you. An overhead cabinet sitting above head height takes it at the bottom corner, so you reach up and pull down. Anything you stand over, like the cupboard under the kitchen sink, takes it at the top corner instead.
Length follows the height of the door, and on a tall one it settles the question for you — a pantry or a full-height cupboard carries a handle running vertically down that opening edge, long enough to reach for at any height and far longer than anything you would put on a drawer. A short door wants something correspondingly smaller, or the proportion goes wrong.
At those two corners a knob is often the better answer — on the overheads, and on the sink cupboard, where two doors open as a pair and a knob on each keeps the line between them clean. Handles on the drawers, knobs on the overheads and on the sink pair — that combination is about as close as a modern Australian kitchen gets to a default.
That is the whole job
Four steps, one measurement that matters, and no specialist tools. Get the fixing centres right before you order and the rest of it is half an hour with a screwdriver.
If you are not certain what your existing holes measure, take a photo with a tape measure across them and send it through before you order. We would much rather answer a question first.
And if you have not chosen the hardware yet, start with the drawer handle size guide — getting the length right is the half of this job that happens before anything is drilled.
