I lied.  Installing sinks is not hot sexy fun. But it is wet.

_{doesn't look half bad does it?  all that light stuff around the sink is laminate where tiles need to be.} 

Let me try to make you understand that this may have been the most difficult home improvement project we've tackled, to date.  The Hubbin’s confidence in his ability to get to it was the culmination of years of smaller jobs that have been forced upon his more geekish brainiac person due to our limited budget in combination with “this old house” falling down around our heads. 

My husband is the muscle as well as the electrician, the plumber, the handsome sweaty yard guy.   And I give him props because the man has taught himself major home repair skills and he's unstoppable when he puts his mind to it.  

He’s put up everything that needs putting up (and in a big house that’s a lot of nailing, screwing, sawing, leveling and taking down as well).  He’s done all the complicated electronic setups, built structures from boxes with eerie weird and incomprehensible instructions that would have been funny if they weren't so necessary.  He's put in a kitchen counter, various cabinets, a bathroom sink and assorted faucets and only once needed the plumber to make a complicated final hookup for a weird configuration.   I do a lot of the work too, but he's the heavy lifter. 

Three or so months ago it became obvious the kitchen sink and faucet required a change and while discussing this, the Hubbins stepped up to the plate, feeling he could handle the job.   

I was a little concerned.  First this was heavy labor and a job that needed to be done quickly.  We couldn’t live without water for any length of time.  And removing sinks, pipes, unscrewing old connections without destroying threads or cracking old pipes, tightening and making watertight connections is seriously hard work.  

But the most important reason to be worried was that in truth, my Hubbins HATES doing this stuff.  Just because he has to, doesn’t mean he likes it.   And he gets vocal.  VERY vocal as the job progresses.  I cringe as I feel both our bloodpressures make our heads inflate like ugly red balloons.  The dogs run and hide.  The neighbors do…well, whatever……their job is listening to the bloodletting.  

But nomatter the grief, this was a job that needed doing in a big way.  There was a leak somewhere.   Tiles had come loose, the faucet wasn’t sitting properly, we thought the wood - under the laminate - under the tile might be softening.   

 

When we first bought this house almost eight years ago, the kitchen came with acidic yellow marbled laminate around the sink, stovetop and all backsplashes.  I decided the answer to this visual horror awaiting me first thing every morning was to create a mosaic mural on the backsplashes and tile the countertops right up to the sink and stovetop. (If you want to see my mosaic work, scroll down the page.)   My patch job would hold the fort until we could afford to hire the cavalry (Home Depot). In the meantime, none of the existing cabinetry, plumbing or appliances would have to be torn out and re-bought, re-installed, re-plumbered and re-electicianed.  It would buy us time, I'd do some creative handiwork and it would look great.  And it did.

It held for four years.  Then last summer I had to retile around the sink and on the counter edge because after the old dishwasher died, clouds of steam from the new one kept lifting off the edge tiles.  Then it seemed to me the sink area was getting that look that suggested behind the scenes leaky foulness, decrepitness and rot was taking place.  

I happened to have had, as a matter of fact, a new faucet because  - get this! - Moen will give you a new faucet if you buy one and it craps out on you at any time. It’s guaranteed for LIFE!!  Oh yes. 

_{look closely. there is a lesson to be learned here.  a faucet stem and base will not easily be put in their precise positions until the moment they choose to.  and not one minute sooner!}

I explained to my husband (who had installed our first kitchen faucet and had hated doing the first time) we might as well get a new sink and start fresh especially because I needed to retile under it.   Old mosaic next to the sink were popping up every day, the entire area was coming loose and needed retiling and since we had to do something anyway, it might even be easier to put in a new sink than trying to take out, retile and put back in an ugly old sink!!  

_{working mojo} 

Still talking fast, I shpeiled we’d get something that would add to the value of the house and look spectacular and update it.  The newer ones are bigger inside, hold more dishes, blah blah. My brain and mouth were going a mile a minute at that point.   All my perfect rationale and reason did not get through his resistance to the idea.  Add to this I wanted to hire a plumber to do at least some of it.    

But he is a practical man and on his own the Hubbins considered the foul ugliness of cleaning and scraping away at the sodden gunky slimy hardened glop on and under our old sink and the hourly cost of said professional.  Add to this he had so many nice tools and DIY books and a healthy womanperson to assist, so a nice sink might be the ticket.  He was up to the job of installation, he felt.  

And since he was being “asked” by his company to take additional furlough days from his job thanks to the nation’s booming economy, we’d have four days to do it!

So I dug into my little household account and he into his Christmas fund and we bought a sink. 

And then came the fun of throwing shit at the fan!  wheeeeeeeee! 

The plan:  first the far portion of the kitchen counter would get tiled, glued and grouted and sealed.  That’s two days of work.  I could start that before he started his furlough. The timing HAD to fit.  

_{important fact:  eating a breakfast heavy on proteins and fats will have your man (or woman) feeling fit and ready to tackle any catastrophy!}  

Next step: the water would be shut off, the old sink is taken out, new tiles are glued in, grouted, next day the new sink dropped in place, beautiful new faucet next, water back on.   Voila! 

_{Day One: the family water supply for the weekend of August 29 to  Sept 1}

Sounds so simple.  Not so much.  Complications.  Discoveries.   Shit happens.  A LOT of shit happens.  With water and plumbing, shit ALWAYS happens.  If it leaks, the water must travel.  We have a basement.  Need I say more?

Let me list some of the glitches and complexities we encountered:

From my end at first a simple problem: the gluegun fritzed out.  Not so bad, right?  Still, there were three boxes of quarry tile and a short amount of time to tile a counter and I didn’t want to waste an hour or so running over to busy Home Depot for a replacement.  

Solution: I had what I thought was an impressive glue made by Elmers which claimed to be superstrong - NANO glue.  I hadn’t used it but trusting Elmer - who is a male cow - I forged ahead without testing.  Bad move.  

 

  

 

_{evil bumps that came in the night} 

By the next morning, there were concrete-like lumps between and on nearly every tile on the counter.  No, they did not scrape or flake off.  

 I have a dremel.  It took a half day, some sweat and a shitload of dremeling, scraping, sanding, poking and cutting but I got that crap gone.  Second half of the day I grouted.  Late that night I sealed the tile and grout.  Twice. Okay...first job finished.  Looks good.  Downside: somewhere along the way my hands lost a few layers of skin.  

BONUS: Those tiles are PERMANENT!  The counter will ALWAYS be tiled.  Trust me. It is sealed in place with concrete glue and skin cells! Unto eternity.  

Next on the block:  my man removes the sink and old faucet.  His woman cuts to size and puts in tiles and grouts.  She will have, by then bought a new gluegun.  There is no time for mastic glue.  This is a job for fast.  For hot superglue.  The next morning the man will put in the sink and the faucet.    So simple.  Too simple. 

He has already noticed and nearly come to blows with the cabinet façade, the front of the sink cabinet is a snug fit for his large 6’4” frame.  So it must be removed for him to go in to get the job done.

_{the Hubbins before he wanted to kill the cabinet} 

Except it’s been stapled - in a million places, a gazillion pieces.  Some of it is fitted by joints and some of it, not so much fitted as forced with hard little rusty staples, some in, some stretched, some big, some small.  A variety!   

 

_{a calm moment but I can tell you he's not happy that I'm being Jiminy Olsen, Cub Bloggergirl} 

See…this is the stuff they don’t tell you in DIY books or TV:

so I will be your friend here and tell you the real truth: 

When a house is built, those bastards DO ANYTHING to FINISH a HOUSE!  They do whatever the hell they can and put whatever wherever and the hell with you down the line, whoever you are!  

It’s worse if the job is done by homeowners.  Like us.  I think to myself about those permanent tiles on the other counter, that some day an innocent young bride is going to bat her eyes at her new spousie poo telling her darling that she’d like to change the tile over there to something prettier.  Yes indeed.  Life (and homeownership) will continue it's cruel games for generations to come.

Some of the other scientifically sound discoveries we made during this mutual exposition of the mind, body, marriage and blood was the fact that it is altogether possible an entire house can be held together by staples and duct tape and skin cells, and that there are pressure clips that can or not (depending on the owner at the time) be holding in place a kitchen sink.  Imagine that! 

We learned hard truths: that silicon will often (two times in our case) come oozing out of the back of a container, ruining a gun and getting on everything including raw, burned hands.   I learned the hard way that hot glue is an excellent structural bond for replacing facades of sink cabinetry.  And it can effectively remove many layers of already raw skin from hands and fingers at the blink of an eye.  And in combination with silicon, will create what might be termed "living gloves".  

We learned again that water runs down, fast, very fast, that plumbing fixtures often do not fit into one another and that there is nothing about pipes that is standard.  We also relearned that a man, lying on his back in a closed cramped space with relentless water dripping downon his grizzled puss should not have had two big cups of coffee a few minutes before starting that leg of the job.  

_{o joy and halleluja!  it is done! it is done!} 

We again learned there comes a point when the stress and pressure and hard work of something like this can rip the scabs off the normal little pressure wounds of marriage with such a force it can leave you both stunned with the fury of it.  And that scabs heal and marriages do, too especially when all is said and done you can look at something special that you have created together and all of the pain of it's creating making it even more yours. 

(really, it's the bank’s ...but this is the poetic summing up of a feel good moment, so we won’t go into that.)

 _{la famiglia is what it's all about.}

the end.  

or is it?  coming soon:  popcorn ceilings that crack.  lions and tigers and bears, oh my!  

BTW, these are the mosaic tile backsplashes I did in 2003.  they've held and hopefully they'll hold until we're gone.