Galaxy Pistachio Green Corner Molding Cabinets

Walk your plan the way you will walk the kitchen and mark every outside corner you pass within arm’s reach. In most homes the damage concentrates in a short list.

• Island and peninsula corners on the main walkway, particularly the one between the sink and the refrigerator. Our island clearance guide explains why tight walkways put more wear on those corners.
• The end of a run beside a doorway, where bags, laundry baskets and shoulders pass.
• Any corner at bar-stool height, where stool backs and legs knock the panel as they are pulled in and out.
• The base end next to the bin or recycling pull-out, which gets kicked and bumped by whoever is carrying the bag out.
• Pantry sides near a garage or mudroom door, where groceries, strollers and vacuum cleaners come through.

Corners along a back wall, behind the cooking zone, or inside an L rarely need anything. Guarding every corner in the kitchen adds cost and visual noise for no benefit. Guard the ones on the traffic path.

Three corner moldings are listed in this finish, all in 8-foot lengths.

The standard outside piece covers most needs. The wider one is worth its extra $15.60 on the island corner that everyone passes and on any corner at stool height, because it carries the hit further from the arris and spreads it across more material. The inside piece belongs on the corner molding page for completeness, but it is a finishing part rather than a protective one.

One 8-foot length does a lot of work. A base-height corner is about three feet tall including the toe, so one piece guards two base corners with a little over for mistakes, or one tall pantry corner of up to 96 inches. The face widths of the standard pieces are not published on the live list, so if you need to know exactly how far a piece wraps onto each face, ask us.

Colour makes this page more important than it would be for a white kitchen. A chip is a small piece of finish broken away, and on any coloured paint what shows underneath is lighter than the surface. On a white cabinet, a light fleck on a white edge is hard to see. On a mid-value greyed sage, the same fleck is a pale dot at exactly the height where people look.

That is not a flaw in the finish; it is true of every painted colour darker than white. It does mean that the corners you would ignore in a white kitchen are worth guarding in a green one, and that the touch-up kit ($62.40) should be on the first order rather than bought after the first chip. The matte finishes guide covers how painted cabinet surfaces wear more generally.

The side of an island with stools under the counter overhang takes more wear than any other surface in the kitchen, and not only at the corners. Knees, shoes and stool footrests hit the panel face, and the stools themselves hit the two ends every time they are pulled out. That side deserves its own plan.

Start with the overhang. A deeper overhang keeps knees and feet further from the panel, which protects the face; our island clearance guide covers overhang depth for comfortable seating. Then guard the two outside corners on that side with the wider outside piece, since they are the ones stool backs catch. Choose stools with felt pads or rubber feet, and ones whose footrests do not reach the panel when pushed fully in.

Finally, accept that the seating face will need an occasional touch-up. Keep the kit in a drawer near the island rather than in the garage, and deal with marks as they appear; a scuff treated the week it happens is invisible, and one left for a year is not.

Inside corners are rarely knocked, so the inside piece is about appearance, not protection. It earns a place in a few specific spots: where the side of a tall pantry meets the side of a wall cabinet at a right angle, where a panelled island has an L-shaped return, and where a finished panel meets a wall that is not quite square and the joint has a visible shadow. In each case it closes a joint between two finished surfaces with a neat fillet instead of a line of caulk. At $59.80 for eight feet, one piece often covers every inside joint in the kitchen.

A worked example shows how small the order usually is. Take an L-shaped kitchen with an island, a base run that ends beside the doorway to the dining room, and a pantry beside the garage door. Walking the traffic path marks six corners: the four island corners, the run end at the doorway, and the pantry side.

That is $327.60 to guard every corner that will actually be knocked, with a spare in the cupboard. Compare it with the cost of repainting or replacing a finished end panel, and with the base cabinet and panel prices it protects, and the guards are among the cheapest insurance on the order.

The advantage of a separate corner piece is that it is a wearing part. When it has taken years of knocks, it can come off and a fresh one can go on, leaving the panel behind it untouched. That only works if it was fitted to come off.

1. Pin it with small finish nails rather than bonding it along its whole length with construction adhesive. A few dots of adhesive are fine; a full bead makes it part of the panel.
2. Cut the top end square and neat where it meets the counter overhang, and finish the bottom where it meets the toe kick or quarter round, so both ends are easy to reach later.
3. Fill the pin holes with a colour-matched filler or the touch-up kit, not with white filler.
4. Buy one spare length with the order and store it flat in a dry room. A piece from the same batch is the closest colour match you will get later.