Want to know what really drives me crazy in our kitchen? The loud noise that the cabinet doors make as they slam closed! Every time we open and close the doors, our kitchen becomes soooo noisy.

I started to realize that the kitchens I walk through in stores or model homes don’t exactly “feel” like my kitchen. When I open and close a cabinet door in a model home, the door softly closes without making any crazy loud noises.

Expensive kitchens come with a lot of perks. One of those perks is soft close cabinet doors. Not only do they cut down on all the noise in your kitchen, but they also just make everything “feel” nicer.

While I would love to have those high-end kitchen cabinets, right now we have a builder basic kitchen. Upgrading our kitchen isn’t exactly in our budget — or really even necessary.

Having a builder basic kitchen isn’t a bad thing. It just means that our cabinets are very simple. And, that the doors slam shut when you close them.  

As you may know, I love finding ways to make our home look and feel “high-end” without spending tons of money. So, I was on a mission to find a way to make our cabinets “feel” a little bit nicer without having to upgrade them.

I did some searching and I found that you can actually turn almost any existing kitchen cabinet into a soft close cabinet. It’s a really simple DIY project that you can do in no time — and with only one tool.

DIY Soft Close Kitchen Cabinets

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Materials & Tools:

• Soft Close Dampers
• Drill

Ben and I found this set of soft close dampers on Amazon. These little devices go inside of your cabinets and slow down the cabinet door as it closes.

It’s really that simple!

Now, there is one thing to consider before you can install soft close dampers in your cabinets. You have to already have self-closing hinges on your cabinet doors.

An easy way to test this is to open one of your cabinet doors slightly — about 2 inches. Then, let go of the door. If the door closes on its own, you have self-closing hinges.

If it stays open, then you don’t have self-closing hinges. The soft close dampers won’t work on those types of doors.

Thankfully, our cabinets already had self-closing hinges, so we were all set to install the soft close dampers.

Once they arrived, we got to work installing the dampers on all of our cabinet doors.

First, we positioned the adapter (the housing that holds the damper) in the upper corner of the cabinet on the hinge side.

Then, we used the drill to make a pilot hole and then attached the adapter to the cabinet using a screw.

Once the adapter was attached to the cabinet, we just had to adjust to damper based on the door weight of each cabinet. There is a little dial in the back of each damper that will let you adjust the resistance.

You want to make sure the damper is resisting enough so that the door doesn’t slam, but also soft enough to let the door actually close and not keep it propped open.

After all of the soft close dampers were installed, we tried closing one of the doors.

Here’s a quick video of our soft close kitchen cabinets in action:

I don’t think we will EVER go back! Having soft close cabinets is amazing! No more slamming. No more loud noises. Just soft, smooth closing doors.

It’s an instant upgrade to the quality of our kitchen!

So, if you want your kitchen to “feel” high-end, grab a set of these soft close dampers. It’s honestly one of the easiest projects you can do that makes a huge impact in your home.

I hope that you enjoyed this quick and easy DIY project. Let me know if you install these in your kitchen cabinets. I promise you will LOVE them.