We have 30 year old Kraft Maid cabinets in our kitchen. Over the years some of the hinges have broken and the manufacturer sent us replacements, which we've installed ourselves without a problem.

Back in December, the hinges on one of the so-called easy reach corner cabinets broke; I was standing there holding a very large hinged door from an upper cabinet, trying not to drop it on the counter. Took five emails and calls to KraftMaid to find out we never had a lifetime warranty on the hinges (they sent the other ones as a courtesy), so we would have to buy some fancy easy reach ones to replace those that broke.

I decided to look around for pricing, and while I was hinge shopping I saw the soft close style hinges. These wouldn't be for the corner cabinet, but rather for our other cabinets. So, I thought to myself, why not spruce things up and replace our old (self-close) hinges with soft close hinges? Mr wtg and I were tired of doors occasionally slamming shut on us. How hard could it be to swap out the hinges?

I think we're up to about ten different ways that this project isn't straightforward.....

Projects involving doors - of any kind - are never straightforward.

[edit]. I don’t know how along you are, but CabinetParts.com has been helpful as I sort out various door hardware issues at this place.

A cabinet story.

I never did much work on houses except as a favor to good customers. That’s how I ended up having to fix two vanity drawers at a multimillion dollar house in Newport Coast.

High quality vanity with metal drawer boxes and finely detailed hardwood drawer fronts. An elegant little cast bracket held the two pieces together and two of those brackets broke. I could have cobbled something together to make it work but wanted to a proper job. The brackets had a part number on them.

I googled the part number and found that they were made by a company in China. I sent them an email. I got a response the following day - they’re still in production but to order factory direct I had to buy a minimum of 500 pieces. If I wanted fewer than 500 I could contact their Americas rep - in Brazil.

I emailed the rep and he replied within a day. He could not provide the part directly but there is a local firm that stocks them. World of Molding - 8 miles away. I called them - yup, they have ‘em.

Went to the store to find a tub sitting on the sales counter filled with the part I needed. $4 each. The counter guy rang me up and said “Working on big houses in Newport Coast?” I told him I was, and he told me that one cabinet company made all of the cabinets for that development. That company used these brackets and with time every one of them breaks. They stock them and they’re such big sellers they order them 500 at a time.

I picked up a few extra and taped them to the back of a drawer for when they broke in the other 4 bathrooms.

Oddly, we haven't yet purchased the funky hinge for the easy reach corner cabinet that was the catalyst for this whole project. At this point, we plan to take the door, the broken hinge, and photographs and measurements of the cabinet frame to a nearby Rockler store, to see if they have what we need. Easy to return if it doesn't work out.

Thanks for the cabinetparts.com lead; they do have a lot of good info. I think I saw them when I was first looking around but I ended up ordering from Indian River Cabinet Supply because they were a couple of bucks cheaper for each hinge and I needed a bunch of them.

https://www.ircabinetsupply.com/

I've also ordered from Woodworkers' Supply in the past:

https://woodworker.com/

We're mostly done and have found solutions or workarounds to all of our issues. We've had a lot of laughs because as we worked our way around the kitchen to the next cabinet we'd encounter a blip and then solve it. We were like "OK, so now we have these figured out", only to move to the next cabinet and to discover something new and different had gone south.