I think it's a legitimate concern. Can you line the underside of the cabinet with stainless steel or plexiglass or something? And keep a towel handy to wipe off excess moisture.

When you say 15” “deep”, do you mean from the countertop to the bottom of your upper cabinets is 15”? Typical space for that is normally 18”. I would definitely be concerned about damage to the cabinets.

Your countertop oven should have specific guidelines for the safe distance from the top of the oven to the bottom of the upper cabinets. If you don’t have the instruction manual, try an online search for your particular model. Don’t take anyone’s word here for proper distances .....each oven has its own specific requirements.

@fori - when I make my coffee tomorrow, I am going to see how much of a pain it would be to put a cutting board on top to catch the steam, and then wipe off. I can look into lining it, but I am at the stage where I don't want to add things to the very long list of little things that still need to be done....

@nidnay - it is 15" deep in that there are 15" between the tile and the counter overhang, as opposed to the 26" on the perimeter counter/cabs. It would work on the perimeter counter, but I don't like it there as much. Hmph. Thank you for the tip about the countertop oven. I looked at the manual when I was using it while we were cooking in the LR/DR, and there were no cabinets near it, so I missed that part. Right now, I have it under a cab on the perimeter counter, and in fact the manual says not to run it underneath a cabinet at all. That's ok though, I can just pull it forward when I use it.

@Lisa - some years back, my mom put a pan right from the stove onto the laminate and left a huge burn. I didn't care much b/c I too had plans to remodel, although it took us a while to get around to it!

Thanks for the help, all. I will try blocking the steam with a cutting board tomorrow, and if that's a hassle, I'll just move it.

Oh no.... I am sure some of the solutions will come along. I love your coffee nook!

I have slow cooker and rice cooker underneath my corner cabinet. I lined the bottom with a plexiglas from ikea.

All these appliances I never thought about before because I hated my kitchen! It's funny how protective I feel now. I never used to care at all.

You can probably just flop a towel over the coffeemaker when it's brewing. We might be overthinking this.

I just tried the dish towel, and all I can say is that steamers gonna steam. Even two towels still let a lot of steam out, and when I removed them, the machine itself was pretty wet. This is what we're dealing with. Light rail is yet to be attached. Would we just attach a piece of plexiglass to the bottom edges of the light rails and cover everything but the outlets? All the UCLs are on one switch so we don't need access to this particular UCL. Is plexiglass easy to cut?

Anything that lines the bottom would be best installed under the light fixture I think. And it would need to be thin enough to not interfere with the plug mold. At some point you will need to access the light (might be many years though) so you don't want it to be too difficult.

Still that would leave the light rail/front edge of the cabinet exposed to steam as well. I can't think of an easy way to protect that, unless you did use plexiglass and had a small rim of it (really tiny would work I think) that projected just past the edge (I am thinking of how heat, smoke and steam will find the path to continue rising, which would take it across the cabinet/light rail front edge.)

Surely there is some cabinet or design pro who has dealt with this!

When I’m using an appliance that produces steam, I open the cabinet doors wide open. When appliance is finished, I wipe the underside of the cupboard & then close the doors. My cupboards look good yet. Not ideal but it works for me.