finishing the laundry sink part 4 – the final chapter
The sink comes with a hole in the back right corner for the faucet, but the hole for a soap dispenser is optional, and must be punched out by the installer. That’s you. The sink cost a few hundred dollars, and now you have to smack it with a hammer. The underside is scored for the punch-out, and they’ve placed a nice little label on top to aim at. But, still. A few hundred dollars. It’s enough to make you think about just buying a little softsoap dispenser to keep on the counter top.
One.... two....
There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?
Whew
A little work with a file and the soap dispenser base goes right in.
Yeah, it was worth it
It’s much easier to install the faucet before setting the sink in place. The sink also comes with clips that are supposed to grip the underside of the counter top and hold it in place, but the plywood underlayment and backer board together were too thick for the clips. Also, the sink’s right side was so close to the edge of the counter top that there wasn’t room for the clips. Guess I should have read the sink’s installation guide in advance. So I skipped the clips, betting on the sink’s weight and a bead of caulk to hold it in place.
Caulk. Ugh. For some reason, I had a tube of pure silicone sealant laying around, so I ran a bead of it around the rim of the sink and set it in place. What a #*$&% mess. I had to pull the sink out and spend about 30 minutes with turpentine cleaning off the counter tiles and the underside of the sink. Then I got smart and found a tube of kitchen & bath adhesive caulk. It cleans up with soap and water.
After the sink was in place, I ran a thin bead of caulk where the sink met the counter top to seal it off.
Just Say No to silicone
The waste pipe in the wall was a little low, so I had to use an extension to get from the sink drain down to the j-trap. The hot and cold water supply pipes come attached to the faucet, so all I had to do was use a bit of Teflon tape and attach them to the supply valves.
The faucet has a pull-out wand, so there’s an extension hose that hangs down underneath with a doughnut-shaped weight on it to pull it back in when you return the want to the faucet base. One end of the hose connects to the wand, and the other connects to a water supply hose that extends down from the faucet. It’s a push-on connection, which seemed a little… weak to me.
Which, of course, it was. A few seconds after I turned on the water, the pressure blew the hoses apart, and I had a cabinet full of water. As I sopped up the mess, and seethed, I wondered how I was going to get this defective faucet out and return it. It’s almost impossible to access in the back corner of the cabinet. So, I pushed the connection together and turned on the water again. And guess what happened? It held!
A little water never hurt anything
Ok, now back to reality. Seriously, did you think it would hold? If so, your denial mechanism is stronger than mine, because, even as I turned on the water again, I knew it would blow.
This time, as I cleaned up the mess, I suppressed my anger and tried to think rationally. I had to have missed something. But, how could I figure it out? If only there were some sort of… document. Something that describes the pertinent details. I scoured the packaging materials and came across an obscure document called the Installation Guide. Hm. An interesting read. And, it included a reference to a little plastic clip that holds the tubes together. After rooting around through the box, I found that little piece of plastic I had dismissed earlier.
It's alive
The big picture