Cabinet Door Styles for Dummies

full overlay cabinet doors and drawers

In their daily internet surfing, our staffers run across many freelancers who clearly don't have the foggiest notion what it is they're writing about. Not long ago, a staffer brought another post written by eHow's Christine Lebednik (already a four-time DotD) to the nominating committee's attention: it won the prize. In the case of her eHow post "What Are Flush-Overlay Cabinet Doors?" our winner quickly made it clear that she was making it up as she went along.

We have staffers who've worked in the cabinet trade, and one person at AN headquarters is in the middle of a kitchen remodel with all-new cabinets. All of them said the same thing: Christine should have told the OQ, "You need to figure out whether you mean 'full-overlay' or 'flush-inset'; otherwise you'll confuse people" A quick Google search comparison of "full-overlay cabinet" and "flush-overlay cabinet" found that the former is about 15 times as common as the latter; but that – to all intents and purposes – they mean the same thing. Interestingly enough, Lebednik's article does not contain the word "full" anywhere, nor does it contain the word "inset." Instead, Christine undertook to "eddify" us...

"To understand the term flush-overlay in terms of cabinet doors, you need to understand the separate words 'flush' and 'overlay.' These words can apply to other types of carpentry products than cabinets. The word 'flush' refers to alignment: a component of something such as a cabinet has a “flush” nature when it lines up with something else. The word 'overlay' refers to the extent to which one component of something like a cabinet extends over a neighboring component."

Even if you can get past the stilted construction, those daffynitions are still poor. "Flush" simply means "forming a continuous surface." When referring to cabinet doors, "overlay" refers to the fraction of the frame covered by the door when closed: a full-overlay door covers the entire fame, except for enough space for the doors to close together. A flush-inset door is flush with the frame, forming a continuous surface broken only by the outline of the door. Flush overlay? Probably the same as "full overlay."

Lebednik never actually got around to explaining what "flush-overlay cabinet doors" are; the best she could do was point her readers to another source:

"The term flush-overlay... describes the way in which the doors and drawers get fitted together with the functional hardware elements and the frame of the cabinet..."

...after which she butchered the concept of a partial reveal, "explaining" that

"In a reveal overlay cabinet, the door overlap, or overlay, extends only as far over the neighboring portion of the frame as necessary for operation. This cabinet style results in a cabinet with visible, exposed door hinges as well as visible edges of the framework that surrounds the cabinet door..."

...which is, again, bogus: that "necessary for operation" bit is bull; not to mention that a) "visible, exposed" is both incorrect and redundant. Of course, bullbleep of this sort is precisely what you can expect when you ask someone to define a term that not only do they not know, they lack the background to understand the definition. In other words, a Dumbass of the Day.

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