Glass kitchen cupboard doors: clearly a good choice

by Shannon Dauphin
Face Your Kitchen Columnist

Refacing cabinet doors can transform a kitchen for a budget-friendly price. Many homeowners choose to take that transformation to a bigger and brighter level by replacing their old look with glass kitchen cabinets.

Glass kitchen cupboard doors can dramatically broaden the options for your kitchen remodel. From simple glass built permanently into a wooden frame to intricate etched and smoked panes that can be removed for cleaning, glass fronted cabinets come in a wide range of styles that can suit even the most picky kitchen designer.

Cleaning your glass kitchen cupboard doors

Those glass inserts can be gorgeous, but they can also show dust and grime much faster than more traditional wood doors. Cleaning them can be more difficult too, as it can be tough to get inside the little cracks between the wood and the glass. Some glass doors have decorative designs either etched or painted onto them, and that can mean a more difficult cleaning job as well.

To clean your doors without doing any damage, consider these tips:

1. Use a good quality glass cleaner for the doors. Apply the cleaner to a lint-free towel, never to the glass itself. Clean the doors with a gentle yet steady motion.
2. Avoid using glass cleaner on mullions, especially if they are clad in gold, copper or lead. White mullions can be protected with a thin coat of carnauba wax.
3. If camed inserts need a good cleaning, look for steel wool with a rating of 0000. This type of steel wool will not scratch glass and can be used to gently buff the camed inserts.
4. Take care when cleaning over decorative areas, especially those that have been painted on. If your cleaning gets too vigorous and you do chip or scratch the decoration, many kitchen cabinet retailers offer touch-up pens to repair the damage.
5. If your kitchen cabinets have removable glass inserts, wash them well in warm soapy water. Take care to clean the wood parts of the cabinet, both inside and out, before replacing the glass.

Glass door kitchen cabinets can not only make your kitchen seem bigger and lighter, they can also make it easy to transform your space yet again when the mood for a remodel strikes. By replacing the glass in your cabinets or painting the frames a different color, your kitchen can take on a whole new look for a fraction of the cost of new cabinet installation.