Galaxy Horizon Appliance Garage Cabinets

The list has two. GHZ WAG2418 at $968.50 is the straight version that sits against the back wall between two runs of wall cabinets. GHZ WDCAG2418 at $757.25 is the diagonal corner version, with an angled front that fills the inside corner where two worktops meet. The corner one is $211.25 cheaper, and it uses the part of the worktop that is hardest to work on anyway.

Neither listing publishes an interior clearance, and neither describes how the door opens. Those are the two questions to settle before one goes on an order: send us the appliances you want to garage, with their heights and depths, and ask how the door on your chosen code operates. The answer decides whether the thing you are buying it for actually goes in.

A wall cabinet is eighteen inches above the counter and a base cabinet is below it. A garage is on it. Every time the worktop is wiped, the cloth arrives at the bottom edge of the garage, and whatever water is on the cloth gets pushed against it. Kettles, coffee machines and toasters also live beside it, and all three leave water or crumbs on the counter.

On a stain, water left sitting on a wood edge is the thing to avoid. Fabuwood’s care guidance is to blot moisture rather than wipe it around and to use only mild cleaners, never sprayed straight onto the wood. For a garage that turns into one habit: wipe the counter away from the garage, not into it, and finish with a dry cloth along the foot of the box.

The joint where the garage meets the counter matters too. Whether it is scribed tight or finished with a thin clear bead is your installer’s call, and either is fine; what you do not want is a gap that collects crumbs and holds water. Look at it after the first month, when the counter has been wiped a hundred times, and deal with anything that has opened.

A garage earns its price when it hides something you use every day and would rather not look at. It does not earn it when it stores something you use once a month, because a base cabinet does that for less and keeps the counter clear.

• Daily, and ugly on the counter: a toaster, a blender, a coffee grinder, a charging station. These are what a garage is for.
• Daily, and used where it stands: a coffee machine plumbed or kept in place. Ask before planning a garage round it; it works only if the door can stay open while it runs and the machine can be pulled forward.
• Weekly or less: a stand mixer, a food processor, a slow cooker. Put these in a base cabinet or a pantry, and keep the garage for the daily things.

One safety point, which is general advice rather than anything on the listing: anything that produces heat comes out of the garage to be used. A toaster or a sandwich press is pulled forward onto the open counter, used, allowed to cool, and then put back. A garage is a store, not a place to run a hot appliance with a wood door above it.

This is the point that gets missed on almost every quote. A garage stands under the wall cabinets, so the light fitted to the underside of the wall cabinet above it lights the top of the garage, not the worktop. If the lighting plan runs a continuous bar across the whole run, the length over the garage is wasted.

Plan the lighting round it. A 24-inch light bar on this finish (GHZ LED FLS24) is $487.50 in the Standard or Timber housing and $585.00 in Walnut; a puck set for a 24-inch cabinet (GHZ LED W24) is $113.75. Over a garage, skip it. Light the worktop either side, where people actually work, and let the lighting page price the lengths that remain.

The exception is a garage whose door stays open for long stretches, such as one that houses a coffee machine used where it stands. There, a small light inside the garage can be more useful than a bar above it. Whether a code accepts a light inside is not published; ask.

An appliance that lives in a garage is plugged in inside it, and the socket needs to be planned before the backsplash goes on. The detail that goes wrong is not the socket but the cord. A cord draped forward over the edge of the garage floor gets pinched by the door when it closes, and a cord across the counter in front of the garage is exactly the thing the garage was bought to hide. Keep the socket high on the back wall inside the garage, and push each appliance back far enough that its cord never crosses the door line.

If the kitchen is still a drawing, tell us which appliances will live there and we will draw the garage and its socket together. The free 3D design shows the garage door open, which is the easiest way to check nothing is in its way.

A garage is one of the few cabinets that can be added to a finished kitchen without moving anything else, because it stands on the worktop rather than replacing a box. That makes it a popular late addition, and it is a reasonable one, with three checks first.

1. The gap. Measure from the worktop to the underside of the wall cabinets where the garage would stand, at the front and at the back. Worktops and wall cabinets are rarely perfectly parallel, and the garage needs the smaller of the two numbers. Send both to us with the code.
2. The socket. If there is no socket on the wall behind where the garage will stand, adding one means opening the backsplash. Decide whether you can live with a cord run to the nearest existing socket before committing.
3. The light. If there is already a fixture under the wall cabinet above that spot, it will end up lighting the roof of the garage. Plan to move it or switch that section off.

The colour question comes with it, and it is covered in the next section. Both codes are on the appliance garage list; send us a photo of the spot with the two measurements and we will tell you which one fits.

The garage door is the only stained face in the kitchen at worktop height, and it is opened by someone who has usually just been at the sink or the kettle. It collects fingermarks and water at the pull and along the bottom rail more than any wall door does. A cloth dampened with mild soap and a dry cloth after it, once a week, keeps it right.

Order it with the kitchen. The garage is listed with the accessories rather than with the wall cabinets, but its face will sit directly under your wall doors and beside your worktop, and Fabuwood is clear that colour variation between stained parts is normal and that later parts may not match existing cabinets. A garage added a year later is a new production run next to doors that have had a year of daylight. If you are adding one to an existing kitchen, hold a door sample against your wall doors first.

And keep the Touch Up Kit ($62.40) where you can find it. A garage door takes more small knocks than a wall door, from appliances being slid in and out, and on a stain those knocks are a marker job, not a paint job.