A chip on a door corner, a strip of banding lifting beside the dishwasher, an edge gone rough under the kettle. Most of it is a twenty-minute repair — once you know which surface you are looking at, and whether the board underneath is still sound.
Cabinet surfaces fail in a small number of ways, and almost all of them start at an edge. A face that has been wiped ten thousand times usually looks fine; the corner that met the vacuum cleaner, the bottom edge of the door above the kettle and the side panel beside the dishwasher are where the trouble is. The repair that works depends entirely on what the surface is — a paper-thin melamine skin, a thicker high-gloss sheet, a plastic edge band, a vinyl wrap or paint — and on one question people skip: whether the board underneath has taken on water. Answer those two first and the rest is a fill stick, an iron and some patience.
Work out what the surface is, then match the repair. A chip in a melamine or gloss face gets filled flush with a hard wax stick or a colour-matched filler, levelled, then coloured with a touch-up marker — fill first, colour second. Edge banding that has lifted can usually be heated back down through a cloth with a household iron and pressed until it cools; if the old glue will not take, clean it out and re-glue. If the board under the band has swollen, or a thermofoil door is peeling, no glue will hold it flat — that door needs replacing, and the heat or steam that caused it needs dealing with.
Take the damaged door off — on a European hinge you only loosen the two mounting-plate screws, not all four, and the door lifts away — and look at its edge in good light, then at its back. Five surfaces turn up in kitchens, and they fail and repair differently.
| Surface | How to spot it | What a chip uncovers | Repairs well? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Melamine | Flat face; a fine line where the face meets a separate band on the edge. Every Flip box interior, and the Classic doors | Coarse particleboard chips straight away — the colour layer is 0.02 mm | Small chips, yes |
| High-gloss PET | Mirror-deep face; the same band line on the edge; the back is plain white. Flip’s Glossy White | The edge of a 0.45 mm sheet, then smooth MDF | Scratches well; chips show in the shine |
| PVC edge banding | The 1.3 mm strip round the edges of a door or a box, with slightly eased corners | Either more band, or the core if it was gouged through | Very |
| Thermofoil | No line on the face at all; the film wraps over the edge and stops on the back. Common in older builder kitchens | MDF, and the film lifts as a sheet rather than chipping | No — see below |
| Painted MDF | No seam anywhere, face, edge or back | Fine, even, light-brown fibre | Yes, with touch-up paint |
Two numbers explain most of what follows. A melamine face is a resin-soaked paper 0.02 mm thick — thinner than the paper this would be printed on — fused to the board. There is no depth to sand or polish: any chip goes straight through to the core, so every melamine repair is a fill. The edge band is 1.3 mm of solid PVC, coloured all the way through, sixty-odd times thicker; a knock that would chip the face often only dents or scuffs the band. The materials chapter has the full spec sheet for each Flip door and the box.
Then run a fingernail along the damaged edge and look at it side-on against the light. Flat and hard, with a clean chip or a lifted strip: this page will fix it. A ridge, a wave in the band, or board that feels slightly thicker than the rest of the edge: the core has swollen, and you should read section 06 before you buy anything.
The order is the whole trick, and the troubleshooting page says it in one line: fill first, colour second. Colour put into a hole sits below the surface and shows as a dark spot; a fill brought exactly flush and coloured on top disappears at arm’s length.
Scratches are easier than chips. A light scratch on a high-gloss PET face often sits within the sheet’s thickness and polishes out with a plastic polish and a soft cloth; on melamine, a scratch through the colour layer gets the same marker treatment as a chip, without the fill.
The corner of a door, where two bands meet, is the most knocked spot in any kitchen — chair backs, vacuum heads, shopping bags swung onto the counter. The band is solid colour all the way through, so what the chip uncovered decides the repair.
Matching a door colour two years later is genuinely hard: production batches drift a little, and finishes age. A touch-up marker or a few fill sticks bought with the cabinets cost almost nothing and are an exact match on the day you need them — which, as everybody who has fitted a kitchen will tell you, is about a week after it is finished.
Edge banding goes on in the factory with a hot-melt adhesive: a machine heats the glue, presses the band against the board, and trims it flush. That glue softens again with heat, which is both why banding lifts and how it can often be put back. Before you start, press the lifted section down with your thumb: if the board behind it is flat and hard, carry on. If the band will not sit flat because the edge underneath has thickened, the core has swollen — go to section 06.
A band that has lifted along a long run, or that keeps coming back, can be replaced. Strip it off, clean the edge back to sound board, and apply new banding in a matched colour — pre-glued iron-on banding goes on with the same iron, and an edge trimmer or chisel finishes it flush. On a door face that people see every day, though, a replacement door usually looks better than any re-banding done on a kitchen table.
Banding very rarely lets go on its own. When it does, the cause is nearly always repeated heat or moisture at one spot, and if you re-glue the band without moving the source it will lift again within the year. The usual culprits, roughly in order:
The places to look for early warning are the same every time: the bottom edge of the door above the kettle, the front edge of the side panel beside the dishwasher, the top edge of the doors either side of the range, and the bottom edges of the sink base doors. A slightly lifted band you catch with a fingernail is an iron and five minutes. The same band ignored for a year is a new door.
If water has reached the core under a band or a face, the board itself has changed shape. Particleboard swells when it takes on water and does not shrink back when it dries, and MDF behaves much the same way. You can feel it: the edge is slightly fatter than the rest of the door, the band rides on a ridge or waves along its length, and the face near the edge has lifted into a gentle lip.
No adhesive will pull that band flat, because there is nothing flat to pull it onto, and sanding the swelling away removes the face along with it. This is where the honest answer changes from repair to replace:
Most dishwashers come with a strip of foil-faced moisture barrier meant for the underside of the countertop above the machine. It is often left in the box. If yours was, it is worth fitting when you next have the dishwasher out — and when a dishwasher sits at the end of a run, the finished end panel beside it does the same job for the cabinet side.
If the door you are looking at has no line on its face edge — the colour runs smoothly over the edge and stops in a seam on the back — it is thermofoil: a vinyl film vacuum-pressed over a shaped MDF blank with a heat-activated glue. It was a staple of builder kitchens for decades, and it fails in a completely different way from melamine and banding. It does not chip. It peels, in a sheet, starting at the edge or corner nearest the heat.
Once the film has lifted, the glue under it has been cooked and the vinyl has usually stretched, so it will not lie down again. Glue and an iron can tack a small corner for a while; they will not make the door right. The honest options are a replacement door or, for a whole kitchen of tired thermofoil, new doors on the existing boxes. Painting over it does not help: the paint sticks to the vinyl beautifully, and the vinyl lets go of the board underneath it, taking the paint with it — the painting page has the diagram. If you are deciding between doors and a whole new kitchen, reface or replace starts with taking one door off and looking.
Replacing a single door is often the best repair of all, and on frameless cabinets it is simple. The things that decide whether it disappears are the size, the colour and the holes.
For a damaged box panel rather than a door, the same principle applies on a bigger scale: a kitchen is a row of separate boxes, and replacing one cabinet of the same code is usually far less disruptive than it sounds.
Clean and degrease the chip, pick out any loose flakes, then fill it slightly proud with a hard wax fill stick or a colour-matched filler. When it has hardened, level it flush with a razor blade held almost flat, and colour it last with a touch-up marker in thin coats. Fill first, colour second; colour put into an unfilled chip shows as a dark spot.
Often, yes. Factory banding is applied with a hot-melt glue that softens again with heat. Put a cotton cloth over the lifted band, press a household iron on a low-to-medium setting with no steam along it for a few seconds, then hold the band down with a wooden block until it cools. Test on a hidden spot first, because PVC banding can go wavy if overheated.
If heat will not reactivate the old glue, scrape the residue off and use a contact adhesive brushed thinly on both the band and the edge, left until touch-dry, then pressed together firmly. For a short lifted corner, a few dots of a gel-type instant glue work. Hold it with painter's tape until it cures, and fix the steam or heat that lifted it.
Almost always heat or moisture repeated at one spot: steam from a dishwasher opened at the end of its cycle, a kettle or rice cooker venting under a wall cabinet, oven heat beside a panel, or a wet towel hung over a door. The glue under the band softens with heat and the board under it is open to water at the glue line.
Yes. Opening a dishwasher while it is still hot sends steam up the front of the counter onto door edges and the side panel beside the machine, and over months it softens banding glue and can swell the board. Let the cycle finish and cool before opening, and fit the foil moisture barrier that most dishwashers include for the underside of the countertop.
Not on its own. Melamine's colour layer is only 0.02 millimetres thick, so a chip goes straight through to the board, and paint in the hole sits below the surface and shows. Fill the chip flush first with a wax stick or colour-matched filler, then use touch-up paint or a marker on top of the fill.
No, not so they look right. Particleboard and MDF that have swollen with water stay swollen after they dry, so banding will not sit flat on them and sanding removes the face. Seal a dry, cosmetic swelling so it gets no worse. A swollen door should be replaced, and a swollen side panel that is soft or moving means replacing that cabinet.
Do not run a kettle, rice cooker or pressure cooker directly under a wall cabinet. Pull it to the front edge of the counter while it is running, or keep it in a spot with open air above it. Wipe any condensation off the bottom edge of the cabinet and door afterwards, and check that edge occasionally for banding starting to lift.
Yes, and on frameless cabinets it is simple. Order the same size and the same colour by name, move the hinges across from the old door, hang the new one and adjust it a quarter-turn at a time. Drill the handle holes with a template taken from the old door. A new door can look slightly fresher than its neighbours at first.
A fill stick, an iron and a roll of painter’s tape fix most of what goes wrong with a cabinet surface. Moving the kettle is what keeps it fixed.
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