You set the door straight on a Saturday. It held for a week, and now the gap at the top is open again and the bottom corner is rubbing its neighbor. Or it never came right at all — every turn of the screw moved the problem somewhere else along the run.
Three things cause that, and only one of them is the hinge. Hardware that has lost its grip on the material it is screwed into. A box pulled out of square, so the opening is a parallelogram and the door is not. A door that has changed shape since it was hung. From the doorway they look identical, and two of the three cannot be fixed with a screwdriver at all. So the first job is not adjustment. It is reading.
Read the gap before you turn anything
Stand square in front of the run, level with the door that bothers you, and look at the reveal — the gap between the door and the box, and between that door and the one beside it. The pattern is the diagnosis.
- A wedge at one hinge. The gap tapers, wide at the top and tight at the bottom or the reverse, and the doors either side are still parallel. That is hardware. One door moved and the run did not.
- A wedge that matches the door beside it. Both leaning the same direction, the taper often growing as you walk along the run. That is the box.
- Contact at the corners and daylight in the middle, or the opposite. The gap follows the shape of the panel rather than the position of the hinge. That is the door itself.
The hinge: screws that have lost their hole
The most common of the three and the least serious. A cup hinge holds the door at two ends — a steel cup sunk into the back of the door, a mounting plate screwed inside the cabinet — and both are short screws in engineered panel. Under a heavy door those threads chew out their own hole, and the door drops. Retightening does nothing: the screw turns in a hole with nothing left to bite.
The tell is the schedule. Hardware comes back on a clock — you set it, it is right, and within weeks the same taper opens in the same direction. Seasonal movement takes months and reverses itself.
How you tell, standing there
Open the door and take the weight of the outer corner in one hand. Lift gently and watch the hinge, not the door. Movement at the plate, or a shadow opening behind it, means the cabinet-side screws have gone. The cup lifting out of its pocket, or a hairline crack in the finish around its rim, means the door-side screws have. Neither end moving, but the door and the cabinet face moving together, means you are looking at the box.
Then back one screw out slowly. A screw that spins with no resistance and comes out carrying fluff on the threads has nothing to hold. One that fights you the whole way is fine.
The other version is a setting that never held. On most series the cam does nothing until a separate mounting screw is snugged down, and a door set with the plate loose creeps back over a few dozen openings. A click when you press the closed door inward with a thumb is hardware that is not clamped. Which screw does what is in what a cabinet hinge does.
What the repair actually is
Not toothpicks and glue. Splinters in a round hole give the screw something to compress rather than grip, and that patch holds until the next humid summer. What works is a longer screw reaching into solid stock, a glued hardwood dowel driven in and re-drilled once cured, or moving the plate to fresh material. Which is open to you depends on what the box is made of.
The box: a cabinet that is no longer square
A cabinet leaves the shop as a rectangle and stays one only if what it is fastened to allows it. Screw an upper tight to a wall that bellies at one stud and the back follows the wall while the front tries not to. Set a base run on a floor that falls away and shim it unevenly, and the same happens in the other axis. The opening is no longer square, and no hinge setting squares a door inside a parallelogram.
People miss this one because nothing about the cabinet looks wrong. The doors look wrong. Around Fishers, Noblesville and Geist it is ordinary — walls that wander, floors that dip at a joist, which is also what makes crown molding in a crooked room a scribing job rather than a cutting job.
How you tell, standing there
Take the door off — two clips or two screws, and it keeps its settings.
- Measure both diagonals of the opening. Equal means square. Different means a parallelogram, and that difference is exactly what no hinge can fix.
- Put a level on the cabinet side, then the face frame. A box twisted by the wall usually reads plumb at one edge and off at the other.
- Look at the filler where the run meets the wall. A gap tapering there is a straight cabinet against a wall that is not.
- Back the wall screws off half a turn. If the door settles square once the box is allowed to relax, the wall pulled it. Reversible, and the most useful thing you can do in five minutes.
On base cabinets, pull the toe kick and look at the shims. Missing shims, or shims that walked during install, put the whole load on two corners — which is why leveling the subfloor gets its own line on a scope.
What the repair involves
Loosen, shim, re-level, re-fasten, rehang. Simple to describe. The question is what got attached to that cabinet after it was hung. A base cabinet with nothing tiled against it is a real Saturday. A run of uppers with a backsplash tiled to their underside is not — moving the box breaks tile at its edge, and the new grout will not match. The cabinet is the easy part.
If the taper marches across the whole kitchen, or doors elsewhere in the house started sticking in the same season, stop looking at cabinets. A floor that has dropped or a foundation that is moving is a question for a foundation contractor, not a cabinet adjustment.
The door: cupping, twist, and the one beside the dishwasher
Wood takes on moisture through a humid Central Indiana summer and gives it back through heating season, and it does not move equally on both faces. A door finished heavily on the front and thinly on the back exchanges moisture faster on one side, and the panel curls toward the drier face. That is cupping. Twist is the same thing on a diagonal, and a five-piece door with wide stiles has more material to do it with than a flat slab.
How you tell, standing there
Take the door off and lay it face down on something flat. Press each corner in turn: if it rocks on a diagonal, it is twisted. Lay a straightedge across the back, edge to edge and then corner to corner — light under the middle means cupped. Rehang it and catch the light along the face from the side, and a cupped door shows a shadow that does not change when you move the hinge.
Then ask when it started. A reveal that closes in August and opens in January is seasonal wood movement and may come back on its own. A door that went out and stayed out has taken a permanent set.
The door beside the dishwasher
One door in most kitchens has a reason to move that the others do not. A dishwasher vents hot wet air at the end of its cycle, and depending on the model that vent points at the underside of the counter or sideways into the back of the door beside it. That door takes steam every cycle, on one face only.
Test it. Run a cycle, open the kitchen door at the drying stage, and put a hand where the vent aims. Look at the back of the adjacent door and the drawer front below it for a lifted edge, a swollen bottom rail, a band of crazed finish. A door swelling from steam will not stop until the steam does. Redirecting or shielding that vent is the appliance manufacturer's business, and it belongs with how the dishwasher is mounted and drained.
A cupped or swollen door does not get un-cupped. That is the honest answer. Sometimes a third hinge pulls a twisted door closer to flat, and sometimes it just transfers the twist into the box. Otherwise it is one new door, matched — straightforward on a stained door from a current line, awkward on anything painted, where matching a factory finish becomes its own small project.
Which of these is a Saturday
- Stripped plate or cup screws. Yours. Dowel, glue, drill, rehang.
- A setting that was never locked down. Yours, in minutes.
- One base cabinet racked, with nothing tiled or scribed against it. Yours, with a level and a pack of shims.
- A racked run with countertop, backsplash or crown attached. Not yours. Something has to come off before the box can move.
- A cupped, twisted or steam-swollen door. Nobody's Saturday. Replacement, or living with it.
When it has to be opened up to know
Some of this does not resolve from the room. A door that reads as hardware, has been re-screwed properly, and drifts again within weeks is usually sitting on a box being pulled by something — a wall that flexes, an upper hung on drywall anchors where a stud was expected. You find that by taking doors off, putting a level on the box, and pulling the toe kick to see what the screws landed in. Until then the honest answer is that it depends, and that is what it depends on.
Two things change the conversation while we are in there. A cabinet floor that is soft, dark or swollen under the sink is a water problem, not an alignment problem, with its own causes. And visible growth on the back of a cabinet is a testing and remediation question for a specialist — we do not test for it, diagnose it or abate it, and your county health department publishes guidance on who does.
When the whole kitchen is doing it
One or two doors is a repair. A kitchen where every reveal is drifting, the boxes are particleboard and the doors have taken a set is a different decision — hardware and doors across a whole run, weighed against repainting, refacing or replacing. It turns on whether the boxes are worth keeping.
We do not publish our own prices, for the reason we give everywhere else: a number written before anyone has seen your kitchen is a guess. What we can point at is what independent research says people here spend. Angi, Homeyou and Block Renovation research on the Indianapolis market puts a kitchen project at roughly $18,000–$24,000, with the full spread running about $8,000–$40,000.
Hardware and shims sit nowhere near any of that, which is the point of finding out which problem you have first. Plenty of kitchens we look at need an afternoon of screws and nothing else.
The short version
Read the gap before you touch a screw. A wedge at one hinge with straight neighbors is hardware, and hardware is fixable. A wedge that matches the door beside it is the box, and the box has to be relaxed, shimmed and re-fastened before anything inside it sits square. A door that touches at the corners and not the middle has changed shape, and no hinge setting changes it back.
If the same door goes out again within weeks of being set, stop adjusting it. Something under the hardware is moving, and adjusting only re-hides it.
If you want someone to look at what you have, the kitchen page sets out the two ways we work — keep the layout and change the surfaces, or change the plan — and asking for an estimate gets a door off its hinges and a level on the box first.
