How to hang a cabinet on one stud with drywall anchors

What do you do when you want to hang a cabinet but only one wall stud lines up behind it? Here’s a step by step tutorial on how we combined using drywall anchors and screwing into a single stud to securely hang cabinets in our laundry room.

My plans are slowly taking shape in the laundry room. The cabinets are finally up!

My mom and I were unbelievably excited to have these cabinets up. So excited that I was literally dancing around the house on my tiptoes with joy. Mom more serenely went around organizing all our stuff in the laundry room… never mind that we finished at midnight, and we all should have been in bed! This was a long awaited change, and our laundry room looks so good (and so much bigger) without our old wire shelves.

How’d we do it? Well, it was our first time installing cabinets ourselves, and it was surprisingly doable.

This video from Lowe’s was super helpful, and gave me most of the information I needed.

I ran into one little catch though… with the layout I wanted, there was only going to be one stud behind each of these beautiful 30″ x 42″ cabinets…

So I did some research.

Apparently, hanging a cabinet from one stud is okay if it’s next to another cabinet that is anchored into two studs, and you screw the face frames of the two cabinets together.

That wasn’t an option in our case. Our cabinets have 3 feet of space between them that I plan to fill with a custom shelf 🤔.

Fortunately, my brother and I put our heads together to come up with a solution.

Here’s how we hung our cabinets from one stud by adding in some drywall anchors for extra support.

Supplies for installing a cabinet on a single stud

To install cabinets on one stud, you need three things:

• Your cabinets of choice. (We used these from Home Depot.)
• Cabinet screws. We used 1 1/2″ screws to make sure we didn’t accidentally go through any electrical wiring. (Confession: we used wood screws because I didn’t know cabinet screws existed until a week later. Oops!)
• Drywall anchors. (We used plastic ribbed drywall anchors leftover from another project, but if I were to go buy some today, I’d try these because they’re significantly sturdier.)
• Optional: 1×2 board cut the width of your cabinet and wood screws to install it to the top of the cabinet. You’ll only need this if you want to install crown molding on your cabinets, and there isn’t enough cabinet showing above your cabinet doors to nail the trim on.

For tools, you’ll want a stud finder, a tape measure, a pencil, a level, a drill with drilling and screw driving bits and possibly also a hammer in case your anchors need a little tap to get them in the wall.

It’s worth noting that the cabinets we used had a particle board back and no hanging rail. If your cabinets have a hanging rail, they will be sturdier, but you may need to adjust your screw length accordingly.

How to install cabinets on one stud

Step 1. Prep the cabinet for hanging

The first step of installing cabinets is removing the doors. You’ll want them out of the way so they don’t close on your hand when you lift the cabinet into place later.

Our cabinets have three way hinges, which are great because you can adjust them three ways (in/out, up/down and left/right) to make the doors line up perfectly. But all those screws made it a little confusing when we tried to figure out where to unscrew these things. As it turns out, the best way to remove the doors is to unscrew the hinges from the side of the cabinet as shown in the photo below.

Of course, there’s more than one way to get those doors off. We originally unscrewed the doors from the hinges. We had to unscrew twice as many screws, but hey, it worked!

If you want to add crown molding on top of your cabinets, you’ll want to do one more thing before you install the cabinet (and before you take off those doors!). Check to see whether you have only a tiny bit of cabinet showing above the cabinet doors. If so, then you’ll want to add a 1×2 to the top of the cabinet. That way, you have something to nail your trim into later.

A 1×3 or 2×4 would work as well.

I found these two boards in the garage, and they were already the perfect length. How did that happen?! I have no idea what they are leftover from, but it made me so happy that they already fit perfectly!

All we did was screw them down with wood screws.

Step 2. Predrill cabinet for the stud and drywall anchors

Next, you will want to use a stud finder to figure out where your stud is hidden in your wall. Put a little pencil mark on the wall so you can keep track of where the stud is.

Measure how far the stud is from the corner, and mark that measurement on your cabinet. Make sure you subtract the distance that the face frame sticks out on the front of the cabinet before you transfer the measurement to the back of the cabinet.

In my case, the stud was about 16″ from the corner, but I marked the cabinet back at 15 5/8″ because the face frame juts out 3/8″ on the cabinet front.

Also make sure you are measuring from the correct side of the cabinet, so that it matches up with the way you measured from the corner of the wall.

All this sounds complicated, but it really isn’t bad when you are in the room with the actual cabinet 😉. If you’ve made it this far, you’ve totally got this!

Finally, predrill the cabinet in three places along the stud line that you’ve penciled in.

Also predrill each of the cabinet corners about 3″ from the edge. This is where you will attach the cabinet to the wall with anchors. For these holes, make sure that you predrill a small hole for the screw that is going to go into your anchor. You do NOT want to make a big hole for the anchor itself.

There are plenty of charts floating around on the internet that show what size drill bit you should use based on your screw size. My older brother gave me an easy tip for getting the right drill bit size for your screw though.

Hold the drill bit up to your screw.

The drill bit should be about as big as the shank of your screw, but definitely needs to be smaller than the threads of the screw. If the drill bit is as big as the screw’s threads, your screw won’t have anything to grip to, so go for a smaller drill bit when in doubt.

Step 3. Install anchors in the drywall

To figure out where you want to install the anchors for your cabinet, you’re going to want to literally hold the cabinet in place on the wall and mark through the holes you predrilled.

And by “you want to hold up the cabinet”, I mean you want to ask someone strong to hold it up for you. My kind big brother got this job and made it look easy 😂.

Alternatively, you could measure. But if you’re a smidge off somewhere, your cabinet installation is going to get tricky later.

You also need to know where the bottom edge of the cabinet should be on your wall. Since I wanted crown molding, I figured out how much space to save above the cabinets to allow for the crown molding, added that to the height of my cabinet, and measured down from the ceiling. Then I marked the wall with a pencil right where the bottom of the cabinet should end up.

My brother lifted the cabinet in place, so I could mark the anchor placement. My mom also pitched in to make sure the cabinet was lined up with the pencil mark just right. It became quite a family project, and believe it or not, we had a blast hanging cabinets together!

If you don’t have an awesome strong helper, you can also temporarily screw a board to the wall with its top edge lined up with the pencil mark. The video I linked to at the top of the page shows this method. That way, the back of the cabinet can rest on the board, and it’s much less heavy lifting. Lucky me, my brother casually lifted the cabinet into place and saved us a step. (Not to mention saving me some extra holes in the wall to patch later!)

With the cabinet held in place, I marked the wall where the anchors needed to be.

I tried using a pencil, but found it was too short to go through the pilot hole I’d predrilled in the cabinet back, so I ended up using a small drill bit instead.

Poking the drill bit through the hole and giving it a little twist by hand gave me a little mark on the wall that made anchor placement a guaranteed success.

No more measuring or possible mistakes, thank goodness!

I had four of these little marks on the wall to guide me.

At that point, everything was pretty straightforward.

I installed anchors in the drywall where I’d made marks. It’s an easy process. Just drill into the wall according to the directions on the anchor package, then push the anchors into place. A couple taps from a hammer helped in my case because the holes are a snug fit.

If you’re wondering… the only reason our anchors here are two colors is that we ran out of one kind of anchor and grabbed these red ones from the basement, so we could finish the project.

Step 4. Hang the cabinet on the anchors and reinforce the cabinet by screwing into the stud

My brother lifted the cabinet into place again, and I zipped screws through the pilot holes, into the anchors.

Then I screwed the cabinet in along the stud with some wood screws. I should have used cabinet screws, but I didn’t know about those at the time!

Step 5. Reinstall cabinet doors

After we had both cabinets on the wall, the last step was to hold up the cabinet doors one by one and screw them back in.

Here they are! I can hardly wait to add shelves between.

Then they’ll need some crown molding after that…

This laundry room is looking loads better!

If you missed my last laundry room post, you can check it out here.

Thanks for joining me today. If you ever want to hang a cabinet from one stud, hopefully this post comes in handy! If not, then I hope you at least enjoyed the glimpse of our laundry room makeover. It’s quite a contrast with the before!

Blessings,