Galaxy Nickel Corner Base Cabinets

A corner is never one line on an order. It is a cabinet, a strip of filler to cover the reveal behind it, and a length of toe kick that has to turn an inside corner on a miter, and if the buried end has to be reachable it is a carriage as well. Below are the four ways to close a 90° corner in this finish, each totalled the way it would actually be quoted, using the displayed prices on the review date.

Two numbers in that table decide most kitchens. The plain blind box finishes at $696.15, which is $198.25 less than the angled box and $390.00 less than the rotating one — a real saving and the reason the blind corner is the default. And the blind box with its carriage finishes at $2,126.15, which is $1,040.00 more than the rotating corner and still leaves part of itself behind a neighbour. The carriage is the one line here we argue people out of more often than any other.

Every one of these is 24″ deep and 34½″ high, the same as an ordinary base, with one door and one drawer over it. The label carries two widths because the cabinet is built to be drawn off the corner, and it carries only one door because the far end of the carcass is designed to sit behind the first cabinet on the perpendicular wall. That buried end has no opening of its own. Nothing in front of it moves. Getting to it means putting a shoulder through the single door and working sideways into a space you cannot see into, which is a different activity from opening a cupboard.

That is not an argument against buying one. It is an argument for deciding, before the order, what the far end is for. The honest division:

• Belongs in the buried end: the roasting pan that comes out at Thanksgiving, the stockpot, the slow cooker, cake tins, the spare bag of flour, platters, the picnic basket. Anything you fetch on purpose, with two hands and some warning.
• Does not belong there: anything you want on a weeknight, anything heavy enough that dragging it over the face frame is a job, and anything that leaks. A bottle that goes over in the dark end of a blind box is discovered by smell, weeks later.
• Does not belong there either: the thing you bought the corner for. If the corner is meant to hold the everyday pans because there is nowhere else, the blind box is the wrong box and the money is better spent on the footprint that opens all the way.

Our guide to base cabinet types sets the blind box beside every other base shape, and the space-saving guide covers the bins and risers that stop a deep dark shelf becoming a heap.

The two widths on the label are the whole mechanism. GN BLB36/39 is a 36″ box that can be pulled up to 3″ away from the inside corner; GN BLB39/42 is a 39″ box with the same 3″ of travel, and so on. The gap that opens up behind it as it moves is the reveal, and the reveal is covered by a filler ripped to width on site. That travel is how an installer lands a run on a wall whose length does not divide neatly, so it is worth spending on purpose rather than discovering at install.

What that means for the order: GN BF3, a 3″ base filler at $26.00, for the ordinary case, or GN BF6 at $43.55 where a long bar pull on the neighbouring door needs clearance. Both are under decorative accessories, and both must ride on the same order as the cabinet so the paint comes out of one batch — a filler bought three weeks later lands within an inch of the corner door, which is the worst place in the kitchen for two sprayings to meet. If the dead 3″ genuinely bothers you, the catalogue does stock GNK TBPO-BF3, a base filler pull-out, at $432.25; it is a narrow tower of spice jars and it costs sixteen times the filler it replaces.

A corner cabinet is the datum for two runs at once, so an error set there is an error made twice. Installers who do this daily work in one order, and it is worth knowing because it decides what has to be on site on day one.

1. Find the high point of the floor along both walls and strike one level line around the corner. Every cabinet on both runs is shimmed up to that line, never to the floor.
2. Set the blind box first, plumb and level, held off the inside corner by exactly the reveal the drawing calls for — the number you decided on paper, not the one that looks right on the day.
3. Fix the filler to the blind stile now, before anything stands on the return wall. Once a cabinet is in the way there is no room to get a drill in there, and that is how fillers end up face-nailed.
4. Run the return wall next, working away from the corner, so whatever error accumulates lands at the far end of the run where a scribe or an end panel absorbs it.
5. Then the first wall, the same way. Check the two runs against each other with a straightedge across the corner before the counter is templated, because the fabricator measures what is there, not what was drawn.
6. Toe kick last, mitred at the inside corner. GN TK8 is an 8-foot length at $55.90 and GN TKC, the toe kick cap, is $7.80; a corner eats more length than a straight run because the recess turns as well.

One thing to settle before any of that: the hand. The buried end is cut at the factory, left or right, and cannot be swapped on site. Draw the L, mark the wall the blind end goes under, and if the drawing leaves it ambiguous send it through a free design request and we will call it before anything ships.

The 10x10 kitchen in this finish, FGNK10, is displayed at $3,500.00 against a $5,384.62 list price, and the cabinet list inside it includes exactly one corner: a blind corner base. That is not an accident of packaging. It is the manufacturer making the same calculation as the table above — the blind box closes the corner for the least money, and a package priced to a number closes it that way. Our 10x10 pricing guide breaks down what else is in that figure.

The upgrade path, if you want one, is not the carriage. It is the footprint: if both walls can spare 33″ or 36″ from the inside corner, the angled box or the rotating box buys a corner with nothing hidden in it, for less than the blind box plus its hardware. The rest of the finish, corner boxes included, is on the Galaxy Nickel collection page.