Galaxy Nickel Cabinet Skin Cabinets

Skins are catalogued against a cabinet rather than against a dimension, because the shape matters as much as the size: a base side has a toe recess cut out of it, a tall side is seven or eight feet of continuous face, a wall-with-drawers side is twice the depth of an ordinary upper. Ordering by cabinet code rather than by measurement is what stops all of that going wrong.

Two patterns in that column are worth reading rather than skimming. The first: all four wall heights cost exactly the same. A 42-inch skin is not a penny more than a 30-inch one, which means the money gives you no protection against ordering the wrong height — and a skin one size short leaves a horizontal strip of bare box at the top of the run, at eye level, where on a painted kitchen against a pale wall it reads as a dark band rather than as a small omission. Check the height twice; the price will not check it for you.

The second: depth drives the price, not height. GN SK WD, for a wall cabinet with drawers, costs $169.00 — identical to the full-depth pantry skin and more than three times an ordinary upper — because a wall-with-drawers box is 24 inches deep rather than 12. If a quote shows a $50.05 part on a deep upper, it is the wrong part.

The only honest way to decide is to put the skin next to what you would otherwise buy for the same end, and look at the gap.

At base height the difference is $87.10 and it buys a face rather than a covering, which is a decision taken end by end on the decorative end panel page. At tall height there is no framed alternative in stock, so the choice is a skin or a sheet cut down — and a sheet cut down means a site cut, a banded edge and an hour of somebody’s time, which usually closes the $126.75 gap entirely. At every height the skin is the default and the upgrade has to earn its place.

• Seen face-on at close range. An island seating side or a peninsula facing a sofa presents the flat of the end to somebody sitting two feet away. A skin has no frame, no reveal and no shadow, so beside a run of shaker doors it reads as the one flat thing in the kitchen.
• On a floor that is out of level. A skin is fixed flush to the box and stops at the bottom of it. If the floor falls away across the width of the cabinet, the gap under the skin tapers, and a tapering dark line at ankle height is more conspicuous than a straight one. This is a fitting problem before it is a product problem, but the skin is where it shows.
• Where the front edge is exposed and unbanded. The skin’s leading edge sits at the very front of the run, at hand height, at the point people brush past. Left raw it shows core; and on a painted finish a near-match band is worse than no band, so it has to be the banding made for the line.
• Over a box that is already bowed or damaged. A thin sheet telegraphs whatever is under it. On a reface or a repair, a skin over a swollen carcass side follows the swelling exactly, which is the one case where the cheap answer is genuinely false economy.

And the case where a skin is unimprovable: a run dying into a wall, a cabinet beside a doorway, an upper end in a corner, any side seen only edge-on as two feet of vertical line. Nobody has ever looked at a $50.05 covering in that position and thought about it for a second. That is most of the exposed ends in most kitchens, which is why this page is not the place to spend money.

A skin is glued and pinned to the cabinet side. It is not structural, it is not load-bearing, and it does not want to be screwed through from the inside — pin it, set the pins, fill them, and the face stays flat. Done well it is invisible; done in a hurry it shows every fixing.

The first thing that goes wrong is sequence at the floor. The skin goes on before the toe kick, so the kick can be cut to die into it rather than the other way round, and GN TKC caps at $7.80 close the end grain at that junction. Kick first means a visible butt joint at ankle height for the life of the kitchen. The kick range is on the toe kick page.

The second is the wall end. Where a skinned cabinet meets a wall that is not plumb, the part that gets scribed is a filler or a scribe moulding — GN SM8-S at $39.00, GN SM8-D at $41.60 for eight decorative feet — and not the skin itself. Scribing a skin means cutting a finished edge on the most visible line of the assembly. Fillers are supplied oversize for exactly this job and cost $26.00; the filler page has the rest.

Walk the plan and mark every cabinet side a person can see from anywhere — including from a hallway, from a seat, and from the top of a staircase if the kitchen is open. Then decide, end by end, which of those marks is a face and which is an edge. The faces go to the end panel page; the edges are all skins, and skins are the cheapest line in the order by a distance.

Order them with the cabinets rather than after. They are finished in the same run as the doors, and a covering fitted directly beside a door is the worst possible place for a batch variance. Lead time is the collection’s seven days to three weeks, pre-assembled, on a KCMA-certified AWI Premium Grade build with the Fabuwood limited lifetime warranty.

The skins are here, the rest of the finishing range is on the decorative accessories page, and the cabinets they belong to are on the base, wall and tall pages. The full finish is on the collection.