Unsung hero of interior protection doesn’t get respect it deserves
Call it the Rodney Dangerfield of interior protection products. When it comes to corner guards, many designers and building owners simply don’t grasp the superior performance and protection they deliver.
Try this little test
Take a 5 minute walk through your building and count the number of corners. We just did that in our office space here at Inpro – the space is approximately 25’ wide and 75” long. Guess how many corners there are? Would you believe 75?
Now, not every corner in a space needs a corner guard. But if we’re truly honest, many of them could benefit from some added protection.
There are corner guards, and then there are corner guards
In our business, we hear this tale more often than we care to: The building manager tells maintenance he or she is tired of the beat up corners in, say, the elevator lobbies. So, maintenance dispatches staff to the local big box home improvement store for clear, polycarbonate corner guards. That’s very often a big mistake.
Don’t get us wrong … yes, in certain low-traffic spaces clear or tape-on corner guards are likely fine. But, our experience is within days or weeks or no more than a few months, many low-cost corner guards are already cracked and damaged, and often so is the paint and drywall behind them. When it comes to interior protection, you get what you pay for, and going cheap (aka value engineering) costs. The old “ounce of prevention …” axiom.
The chronic do-over
Just about every facility has a handful of corners that are constantly being torn up and bashed. If the damage is in a public space, you don’t want to leave it looking wrecked, so someone on the staff is assigned to repair the corner … again … and again … and again.
So, doing a little ballpark figuring, let’s say that a corner, including dry wall and painting repair, gets fixed three times a year. By the time the workman:
