Cabinet Overlay, Explained: Full, Half and Inset
Overlay is how much of the cabinet a door or a drawer front covers, measured from the edge of the front inward. It is one of two numbers that decide the size of every front in a kitchen, and it is the one that also decides which hinge you can use.
At a glance
| What it is | The amount of cabinet a front sits over, per edge |
|---|---|
| How it is measured | From the edge of the front inward, in millimetres or inches |
| Its other half | The reveal, which is the same gap counted from the opposite side |
| What it decides | The size of every front, and which hinge will physically work |
| The three cases | Full overlay, half overlay, inset |
What the word means
Put a door against the front of a cabinet and it covers some of the cabinet. The amount it covers, on any one edge, is the overlay for that edge. A door sitting over 15 mm of the cabinet side has 15 mm of overlay there.
The same gap has two names depending on which side you count from. Overlay is the wood the door covers. Reveal is the line of the cabinet left showing beside it. One number, two vocabularies, and a conversation goes sideways fast when two people are using different ones.
Full, half and inset
| Full overlay | One door covers nearly the whole thickness of the cabinet side it hangs on. It is the standard frameless look: a run of fronts with thin, even lines between them and almost no cabinet showing |
|---|---|
| Half overlay | Two doors share one partition between two cabinets, so each gets roughly half of it. This is a case, not a style choice: it happens wherever two boxes meet on one side and both want a door |
| Inset | The overlay is nothing. The front sits inside the opening, flush with the cabinet edge, with a small even gap all the way round. It reads as furniture and it is the least forgiving to build, because the gap has nowhere to hide |
The hinge decides whether your overlay can exist. On a European cup hinge, the boring distance, the mounting plate height and the crank of the arm set the overlay together. Pick the door position first and the hinge afterwards and you can end up with a run of doors that cannot open past each other.
Where it shows up
Set the overlay once for a job, before any front is sized. It flows into the size of every door and drawer front, into the hinge and mounting plate you buy, and from there into the parts list and the sheet count. Change it late and you resize the fronts, reorder the hinges and renest the sheets, in that order.
The full arithmetic, including how to size a front from an opening in both frameless and face frame construction, is the overlay and reveals guide.
Common questions
What does cabinet overlay mean?
Overlay is how much of the cabinet a door or a drawer front covers, measured from the edge of the door inward. A door that sits over 15 mm of the cabinet side has 15 mm of overlay on that edge. It is the same gap as the reveal, counted from the other side: overlay is what the door covers, reveal is what it leaves showing.
What is the difference between full overlay and half overlay?
Full overlay means one door covers nearly the whole thickness of the cabinet side it hangs on. Half overlay is the case where two doors share one partition between two cabinets, so each one gets roughly half of it. The names describe how much wood each door is allowed, and each case has its own hinge, which is the part that decides whether the door can physically sit there.
Is inset a kind of overlay?
It is the case where the overlay is nothing at all. An inset door sits inside the opening rather than over the front of it, flush with the cabinet edge, with a small even gap all the way round. It looks like furniture and it is the least forgiving to build, because the gap has nowhere to hide.
Keep reading
A CabDesign glossary entry. Check every allowance against your own hardware and a scrap before cutting a run. Back to the glossary.