Our kitchen sink has been a problem since we first moved in to our house a year ago. It was not sealed anymore so it was able to move around a little and if we splashed or spilled water on the counter it would leak under the sink. We finally got around to taking care of this over the weekend. The easiest and cheapest option would have been to just take the sink out, clean the counter of the dried silicone and then re-seat the sink and hook it all back up, but of course we didn’t choose this option.

We have never really liked the sink or the faucet; they were both dirty, stained and scratched. The faucet use to leak but we seem to have fixed that, at least for the time being. We also have been replacing our old, rundown appliances with stainless steel ones so we thought it would be good to get a stainless sink as well. We decided to get a single basin sink and install it ourselves. I have a book that described the process pretty well and decided to go ahead and give it a shot.

The old sink came out pretty easily, first I shut off the hot and cold water valves under the sink and detached all the drain pipes, then I took off the water supply pipes going to the faucet. When I pulled out the last drain pipe that went in to the wall I could not believe how bad it smelled! We have had a rank smell in our kitchen some mornings and I usually will take out the trash and spray some 409 down the drains to get rid of it, never really sure what it is, but I think I discovered it! I wiped out the pipe in the wall and hopefully that will keep it from getting that smell again. I was surprised at how easy it is to remove a garbage disposal, just need to take a screwdriver and slide it in a hole where the top of the disposal meets the mount under the sink and push it counter-clockwise and then it just drops right out! I just assumed it would be held in by more than that. After I unhooked everything under the sink I was able to pull the sink out (with Jodi’s help, it is a heavy sink). It came out easily because it was no longer attached to the counter.

I felt pretty good about things at this point, everything had gone smoothly and without incident, but that sure changed. Before we started pulling everything out we had already purchased a new sink and faucet from Lowe’s. We decided to wait till we were working on the project to deal with getting the pipes so that we could drop the new sink in the hole and determine what we actually needed; we wanted to replace all of the pipes, especially after we saw how dirty and smelly the old ones were. We also decided to replace the disposal after pulling it out, plus that way we wouldn’t have to worry about a new mount not working with our old disposal.

The first problem I ran in to was the hole for the sink was a little too small for our new sink to fit. This was better than having the hole be too big for the sink but it still presented a challenge. The sink directions suggested getting a keyhole saw to make the hole larger and I figured I might as well do that instead of getting a power tool since I probably wouldn’t have much need of a jigsaw anytime soon again. I used the $6 keyhole saw I bought for about 5 minutes before I realized I would most likely be working on making that hole larger for the rest of my life so I went to Home Depot and found a great deal on a cheap jigsaw, $10! I bought this and finished the job in much less than a lifetime and got to fill the kitchen was sawdust while at it.

The next problem I had was I used a different brand of silicone caulk than I had before and didn’t open the container properly and ended up squirting caulk all over the back of my caulk gun, since the caulk wasn’t able to come out the front it came out the back! This wasn’t a big deal and was solved with me running to Home Depot again to buy another tube of caulk and opening in properly.

The next problem happened after I dropped the sink in with the silicone caulk around the rim and discovered that I could not get the fasteners on the underside of the sink to fit in 2 of the sides. I put the ones in that I could and figured out a way to kind of get the others to work, so hopefully the sink doesn’t come out one day because it isn’t as securely fasted as it should be from under neath. The problem was there was not quite enough extra counter space in the front and one of the sides had a wood divider so there wasn’t quite enough space for the fasteners to sink their teeth in to. In the future this will be something good to keep in mind if I ever try to replace a sink again.

After finally getting the sink in the hole and fastened in it was probably around 9:30pm, the project had started around 2:30pm. I started putting the drain and disposal mount together and discovered that plumbers putty is very similar to playdoh, its interesting stuff. That all came together pretty well, but I wasn’t really sure how good I did it so I was a little nervous it might leak, luckily it hasn’t!

The next problems were my own fault and were easily solved. I realized that the disposal doesn’t come with a power cord, just wires to hook up to, this was easy to fix by going to Lowe’s again and buying a power cord kit. The problem was that I didn’t discover this until the store was closed so it got put off till Monday. The next problem was I put the p trap pipe in backwards which meant the drain from the disposal didn’t quite reach, so I decided I needed another short pipe, another thing that I could resolve on Monday when the store opened again. The last problem was I missed the step on the disposal where I needed to punch out the dishwasher drain plug so that the dishwasher was able to drain, this was easily solved by looking at the instructions again, finding out I needed to do that and then dropping the disposal back out, punching out the plug and putting it back up.

After I finally got it all put together I had a small leak where I had attached my new extension pipe to the p trap pipe. I took it apart and figured out if I turned the p trap pipe around I didn’t need the extension pipe and everything fit together much nicer, without leaks! Finally, the project was complete only about 48 hours after it started!

We kind of figured it was good that we weren’t able to use the sink on Sunday and Monday morning because that way it made sure and gave everything time to dry so we weren’t tempted to run the water and possibly ruin the silicone seal. Now that I have completed the project I think I could do it again without nearly as much trouble, although I don’t have it on my list of things I would like to do again!