Here's the moment that stops most IKEA kitchen upgrades cold: you're ready to order new doors, you pull out a tape measure, and you freeze. Measure the wrong thing and you don't just lose a door. You lose the time, the shipping, and the money on a full reorder.
Good news: measuring for IKEA Sektion fronts is simpler than it feels, once you know the one rule that prevents almost every mistake.
This post gives you a repeatable way to learn how to measure IKEA cabinet doors, plus the four gotchas that cause reorders. Follow it and you'll order once.
The short answer
Measure the cabinet box, not the old door. IKEA Sektion cabinets come in standard widths, and quality replacement fronts are cut to match those box sizes, with the correct overlap and gaps built in. If you measure a door you already have and it was ever wrong, you just copied the mistake.
What you'll need
A steel tape measure, your IKEA kitchen plan or parts list, a notepad, and about ten minutes. If you saved your IKEA order, half your work is done, because it lists every cabinet size.
Step by step
- Find each cabinet's width. Sektion base and wall cabinets come in standard widths: 12", 15", 18", 21", 24", 30", 36", and so on. Measure the box itself from outside edge to outside edge, or read it off your IKEA plan.
- Note the cabinet height and type. Is it a door cabinet or a drawer cabinet? Drawer cabinets need drawer fronts, which come in their own standard heights (commonly 5", 10", and 15").
- Count doors per cabinet. A 24"+ cabinet often takes two doors that meet in the middle, not one wide door. Get this wrong and the fronts won't line up.
- List your drawer fronts by height. Walk each drawer bank and write down how many fronts and at what heights. A single pot-drawer stack can use three or four fronts.
- Flag every exposed side and panel. Any cabinet end you can see needs a cover panel. Islands, peninsulas, and the gap beside your fridge usually need panels too.
- Don't touch the hinges yet. Sektion fronts reuse IKEA's standard hinges and boring pattern, so you're ordering fronts sized to the box, not re-engineering the cabinet.
The takeaway from all six steps: you're building a list of box sizes and front counts, not custom-cutting anything yourself.
Common Sektion sizes at a glance
| Element | Standard widths | Standard heights |
|---|---|---|
| Doors | 12", 15", 18", 21", 24" | Up to 60" |
| Drawer fronts | 15", 18", 24", 30", 36" | 5", 10", 15" |
Use this to sanity-check your list. If you wrote down a "23-inch door," you've almost certainly measured the door opening instead of the box, or missed a gap.
The four costly gotchas
1. Reveal gaps. Doors don't cover the box edge to edge. There's a deliberate small gap around and between fronts so they open without rubbing. Good suppliers build this in, which is exactly why you order by box size, not by the space you see.
2. Filler panels. Where a cabinet meets a wall or another run, there's often a filler strip. That's not a door. Don't try to order a front for it.
3. Appliance and end panels. Dishwasher panels, fridge surrounds, and visible cabinet sides are separate pieces from doors. Miss them and your kitchen looks half-finished.
4. Trusting the screen over the box. Your IKEA account shows what you ordered. Your actual kitchen shows what got installed. If a cabinet was swapped during the build, only the physical box tells the truth. Measure the box.
"Can't I just reuse IKEA's door sizes?"
You can, and that's the easy path when your kitchen was built to plan. Order fronts in the same Sektion sizes IKEA used and they'll fit. The measuring above is really about catching the spots where reality drifted from the plan: swapped cabinets, added panels, that odd filler by the window.
"What if I measure wrong anyway?"
Then don't measure at all. If the tape measure makes you nervous, hand the job to someone who does it daily. With Kitch's design help, you send your IKEA plan and we spec every front, panel, and size for you, so the order is right before anything gets cut.
The takeaway
Learning how to measure IKEA cabinet doors comes down to one habit: measure the box, use the standard Sektion sizes, and account for panels and gaps. Do that and a reorder becomes almost impossible.
Want a printable version to take to your kitchen? Grab the free Kitch Sektion Measuring Checklist, or if you'd rather not measure at all, start your design and we'll handle the sizing for you.
FAQ
Do I measure the cabinet or the old door? Measure the cabinet box. Replacement fronts are cut to IKEA's Sektion box sizes with the correct gaps built in, so measuring an old door just risks copying an existing error.
What are the standard IKEA Sektion door sizes? Common door widths are 12", 15", 18", 21", and 24", with heights up to 60". Drawer fronts come in widths like 15", 18", 24", 30", and 36" at 5", 10", and 15" heights.
Will new fronts fit my existing IKEA hinges? Yes. Fronts made for Sektion use IKEA's standard hinge boring, so they mount on your current boxes and hinges.
What causes most reorders? Ordering by the wrong dimension: measuring the door instead of the box, forgetting cover and appliance panels, or missing filler strips.