How to Fix a Wardrobe Door That Will Not Close Anymore
Diagnosing which of three problems (a hinge, a warped door, or a shifted carcass) comes first, then adjusting European concealed hinges in the right axis without making things worse.
A wardrobe door that will not close is almost always one of three problems, and the trick is knowing which before you start turning screws. Sometimes it is the hinge, and a two millimetre turn puts the door back where it belongs. Sometimes the door itself has bowed, usually because a radiator or a bathroom wall sits too close on the other side. Sometimes the wardrobe has racked because the floorboards under it have moved, which is common in older UK terraces where the joists breathe with the seasons. Adjusting the hinge on a wardrobe whose carcass has twisted just moves the problem sideways, so diagnosis comes before adjustment.
Before you touch anything, work out what actually moved
Stand square in front of the wardrobe with the door hanging open. Look at the gap between the door and the carcass along all four edges. If the gap is wider at the top than the bottom, or the other way round, the hinges need adjusting on the vertical (height) axis. If the gap is wider on the hinge side than the latch side, the door has shifted sideways. If the door touches the frame at the top but sits proud at the bottom, the depth is off. If the gap looks fine but the door still will not close, either the door has warped along its length, or the carcass itself is no longer square.
A quick diagnostic pass, in this order:
- Open the door fully and press a straight edge (a metre rule works) flat against the inside face of the door. If light shows through the middle, the door has bowed.
- Close the door as far as it will go without forcing it. Note where it stops. Contact at the top only usually means the top hinge has drooped, or the door has warped forward at the top.
- With the door closed, run a finger along the seam. Uneven pressure means the carcass is out of square, not the door.
- Put a spirit level on the floor immediately in front of the wardrobe. Anything over 2 mm of tilt across the footprint will show up in the door alignment.
Do all four checks before touching a screw. The most common mistake is adjusting a hinge to compensate for a warped door and ending up with two problems instead of one.
The three-axis hinge and how it actually adjusts
Every wardrobe built in the last thirty years or so uses what the trade calls a European concealed hinge, or a cup hinge. Blum, Hettich and Grass make most of them. They mount into a 35 mm cup drilled into the back of the door and a plate screwed to the inside of the carcass. What matters is the three adjustment screws. The Blum guides (blum.com) show this most cleanly, but the layout is standard across the three main brands.
| Axis | Screw location | Total range | What it fixes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Side-to-side (lateral) | Front screw on the hinge arm, nearest the door | About 4 mm | Uneven gap left versus right |
| Depth (in-out) | Middle screw, running through a slot | About 3 mm | Door catching the frame, or sitting proud when shut |
| Height (vertical) | Two screws on the mounting plate itself | About 4 mm | Gap wider at top or bottom of the door |
Use a PZ2 Pozidriv screwdriver, not a Phillips. They look similar but a Phillips will cam out and burr the head. Adjust in quarter turns, close the door, check, adjust again. Full turns are usually too much and you overshoot. For the height axis, loosen both plate screws slightly, slide the plate in its slot, then retighten. Both hinges need to move together or the door racks against itself.
When the door itself has warped (and how to tell)
Solid wood doors warp with humidity. So do veneered MDF doors, more slowly, and cheap particleboard doors, worst of all. If the straight-edge check showed light in the middle, adjusting hinges will not fix this. It will only mask it for a week.
A door that bows outward at the top (called cupping) usually means moisture on one face. Common causes: an internal radiator, a bathroom wall behind the wardrobe, or a slow damp patch on the plaster. Consumer Reports has decent background on humidity and wood movement (consumerreports.org). Move the wardrobe 30 mm away from the wall, put a hygrometer in the room, and see what the humidity actually is. Anything consistently above 65% will keep warping your doors no matter how many times you adjust the hinges.
For mild warping, up to about 3 mm across a full-height door, you can add a magnetic catch or a roller catch at the point of maximum bow. It will not straighten the door but it will hold it shut. Screwfix sells them for around £3. For anything worse, you are looking at replacing the door, and if the wardrobe is IKEA the replacement is usually cheaper than the labour to try to save it. PAX doors run around £30 each on ikea.com/gb.
When the carcass has racked or the floor has shifted
Older houses move. UK terraces built between 1880 and 1930 sit on suspended timber floors that dry out in summer and take up moisture in winter. A wardrobe that was perfectly plumb in April can be out by 5 mm by November. You notice this first on the doors.
Check the carcass by measuring the diagonals of the door opening, corner to corner both ways. If the two numbers differ by more than 2 mm, the carcass is out of square. Fixes, in order:
- Slip a plastic shim under the front foot on the low side. Wickes sells packs of 32 for around £4. Add them in 1 mm increments until the diagonals match.
- If shimming works, check whether the wardrobe is fixed to the wall. Fitted wardrobes racked this way should be unscrewed from the bracket, shimmed, then rescrewed. Forcing the door closed against a racked carcass will eventually crack the veneer around the hinge cup.
- For freestanding units, check the back panel is still fully seated in its grooves. A back panel that has sprung out at one corner will let the whole box twist.
My family elder’s old wardrobe, moved from her house to ours, needed shimming twice in the first year because the two houses had very different floors. It has been steady since. Give the wardrobe a season before you assume the fix has not held.
What to do if none of the above works
Sometimes the hinge itself is finished. The hinge arm develops play at the pivot, or the plastic cam in the mounting plate strips. If you can see the door move up and down when you lift it with the hinge fully closed, the hinge is worn. Replacements are around £4 each from Toolstation. Take the old one to the shop rather than trying to identify it from a photo. Cup diameter (35 mm is standard), overlay type (full, half, inset) and opening angle (95, 110 or 155 degrees) all need to match.
If the door is heavier than the hinges were rated for, common with mirrored doors added later, add a third hinge in the middle. Two-hinge doors above 8 kg tend to droop within a year. Blum publishes weight charts per hinge model on their site, and it is worth checking before you buy replacements.
If after all this the door still fights you, the honest answer is that the wardrobe is done. A flat-pack unit that has moved house twice, been reassembled twice, and had its cam-lock joints cranked shut with a screwdriver instead of a proper turn key is often past economic repair. A replacement PAX runs £150 to £300; two hours of your evening trying to square up a tired carcass may not be the better trade.
Frequently asked questions
Answers to what people ask next once they start turning hinge screws.
Related reading
Frequently Asked Questions
Open the door and look at the back of it. If you see a circular metal cup about the size of a 2p coin (35 mm) recessed into the door, with an arm bridging to a rectangular plate screwed to the carcass, it is a European concealed hinge. Almost every flat-pack and fitted wardrobe built since about 1990 uses them. The three main brands (Blum, Hettich, Grass) share the same cup and plate spacing, so replacements are usually cross-compatible.
Yes, on all three axes. That is the whole point of the design. Only if you are replacing the hinge itself do you need to remove the door, and even then most hinge arms clip off the mounting plate with a single lever or button, so you can work on one hinge while the door still hangs on the other.
The wardrobe is not level front to back. Put a spirit level on the floor of the wardrobe, running front to back. If the back is higher than the front, gravity pulls the door open every time. Shim the front feet up 1 to 3 mm until the floor reads level, and the door will stay where you leave it.
Either the door is hitting the frame before the hinge fully closes (depth adjustment is set too far out), or the magnetic catch has weakened or come loose. Adjust the depth screw first in quarter turns until the door tucks in cleanly. If that does not fix it, replace the catch. A pair of roller catches from Screwfix is about £2.
A quality Blum or Hettich hinge should not need adjustment more than once every 3 to 5 years in a stable room. Cheap unbranded hinges, common on flat-pack wardrobes under £200, tend to need attention every year. If you are adjusting more often than that, look at the door or the carcass first, not the hinge.
Smit Sharma
Smit Sharma writes and edits Repair Habit. He is not a licensed technician of anything. What he knows about repair he picked up the ordinary way: watching his father fix things around the flat rather than throw them away, spending two summers as an apprentice in a small electronics shop, and, once he had his own place, running through the mistakes himself on his own washing machine, kettle, chairs, and car. He is a working parent, a slow buyer of new things, and a slightly obsessive maintainer of the ones he already owns. He does not believe repairing your dishwasher makes you a better person. He believes it is often the cheapest and quietest response to a small problem, which is roughly all the philosophy this site carries.
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