In our phase 3 kitchen remodel, we installed a new sink! By far one of our favorite upgrades so far and it’s one of those things where you don’t realize how much you’ve been missing out until you actually start using it.

(Little note from Ana: YOU CAN FIT SO MUCH IN THIS SINK, IDK WHY WE WAITED SO LONG. DON’T WAIT ON UPDATING YOUR KITCHEN SINK! Large cast iron pan? FITS RIIIGHT IN. Massive stock pot from TJ’s Pho? NO PROB. Baking sheet? LIKE 👏🏼 A 👏🏼 GLOVE 👏🏼!) Okay, back to Theo..

Link to our Project Checklist

The sink & faucet combo that we decided to go with was purchased from Lowes (linked here). It is a single bowl drop in sink with a detaching hose faucet. A few unique features that we love about it is that the arm that holds the faucet in place can be moved out of the way and it doesn’t spring back when using the hose. Another feature is the metal faucet head, most that we’ve researched are plastic. This one is metal, heavy and feels high end. The other bonus is that the sink comes with a grid for the bottom of the sink. We like the grid because when we are doing dishes and all that nasty dirty water is at the bottom of your sink you can set things down without it touching the water.

Out of the most recent upgrades to our kitchen in phase 3, the sink was unique from our past projects. When we installed the sink we ran into a few small road blocks which included the garbage disposal, sink depth, counter leveling and plumbing. If you’ve installed other sinks before or read our previous half bath reno post, the kitchen is only slightly different that. High level steps below on how we installed our kitchen sink.

  • Turned off water supply
  • Turned off disposal in circuit breaker and any outlets near sink (extra precaution)
  • Drain water from P-trap and remove/loosen as much plumbing as you can
  • Score area around sink (we scored the area around it because we painted the counters and didn’t want the paint to peel when removing the sink)
  • Loosening or removing under countertop sink mounts
  • Removing disposal and disposal hardware (to reuse)
  • Loosening Faucet and existing water lines
  • Removing Sink and Faucet
  • Dry Fitting Sink
  • Cutting Under Cabinets to allow sink to fit in depth wise (depth was an issue)
  • Cutting Sink hole bigger in countertop
  • Leveling Countertop
  • Installing Faucet onto sink
  • Installing Sink
  • Installing facet water lines and extensions
  • Installing Garbage Disposal and hardware
  • Installing Plumbing from sink to main line

Here is a list of the tools 🛠 that we needed to complete the install [link to our project checklist]:

  • Wrench (small and large)
  • Basic screw drivers
  • Razor blade
  • Oscillating All purpose tool – this tool is super useful for other projects, but it is optional because it depends on if your sink is too tall for your current cabinet depth.
  • New piping and teflon tape for the connection points (we take a picture of our current piping situation and buy a bunch of different piping and return what ever we don’t use)

Resources:

As you can see in the pictures above we needed to remove the disposal and the existing piping to the sewage line and from the intake water lines. With us painting our counter tops, we needed to razor blade around the kitchen sink to prevent any paint from peeling up. If you plan on using the faucet, you will need to unscrew the nuts from under the sink, you may need to use a wrench. The other thing that is not shown in the pics is that there are small clips on the outside edges under the sink that need to be unscrewed/loosened in order to lift the sink out.

After removing our old sink, we were super excited to dry fit the new sink and realized that it was too tall for the current depth. So we needed to cut a bit off our our cabinets below with our all purpose tool. If you are reusing the disposal, you will need to remove the sink drain flange and the garbage disposal mount from the old sink (See pic below – Drain flange first pic below, it’s the ring around the sink hole; Garbage disposal second pic below, the mount that connects the drain flange to the disposal). That just takes some loosening of screws to get everything off. After cleaning up the existing countertop and cabinet space below, we then dry fit the sink once more and we were able to start re-installing the disposal and all of the new piping! We used clear caulk for attaching the drain flange to the new sink and for attaching the sink to the counter tops (a small bead of caulk around the underside of the sink).

The sink p-trap isn’t installed in the most conventional way, but we did it that way to reduce the amount of repiping needed. An additional pro of the sink is that because the disposal is front and center, we now have more storage space for soap back stock, gloves, etc.

Well, we hope you found this post inspiring and motivating to install your sink yourself. We hope your install goes smooth and that you love your new sink as much as we do ours! If you want to see other things that we focused on in our phase 3 kitchen remodel click here.

Project Completed May 11, 2020