Operation Sink, Etc.- Part 1

Yes, this is a part one because I believe that if this was one post, we might have some skimmers.  And you know how I hate skimmers....Just kidding.  Do what you want.

I believe that I mentioned a certain Mother's Day gift that Scott surprised me with back in May.  Well, he heard my cries of small sink issues and decided to get me a sink that was double the depth of what we have and that would include a sprayer.  I have never been so happy.  Ok, I have, but this was also a good moment for me.  Our sink measured at 5 inches in depth.  5 INCHES. They don't even sell that size in any home improvement stores and you can't wash a bowl without getting water all over the place.  It was time for an upgrade.

Old sink.  Ewww:

We decided to go ahead and replace everything at that point: the sink, faucet, garbage disposal, everything.  We might as well do it right.  We got terrific deals from Amazon on all of these things and had everything shipped right to us.  We order everything online, so it didn't really make us nervous that anything could be wrong and everything showed up perfect thankfully!  Once we finally did have everything we wanted and the sink sat up in the "crap room" for over a month, we were ready to get this thing in there!  We called a really good company that we have used on two occasions for our house: to install our humidfier, and to fix underneath the toilet when the pipes broke causing water to drip into the basement (thankfully in the unfinished storage area).  Did I mention this house is cursed?  ELEVEN YEARS OLD.

Anywho, Scott wasn't going to be there when the guy came to give the estimate, so he gave me a number that we couldn't go over and I was to stick to that.  The first two things this company did for us were pretty reasonable in price, but we both feared it would be much higher than our target price for this project, and as luck would have it, we were right.  The guy explained that the copper water pipes were soldered together so he would have to cut those and put stops in since our faucet was a "screw in" water pipes situation.

See, soldered, water line piping:

 

See, new faucet needs to be able to screw in to the water pipes.  This was a predicament...or so we thought. My iPhone took this picture with zero editing.  I was so impressed with the focus on it:

Any faucet we would have gotten would have had to go into something and the pipes would have to be cut no matter what so that was one thing he would have to do. He would also have to switch out the PVC piping since the sink is about twice as deep as our old one.  Ok, whatever, give me the estimate.  He calculates everything in his head and gives me the quote of $833.75.  I hope he didn't just hear me shart my pants.  I pretend that I'm not about to pass out and say that was way more than we would ever pay.  He goes on to say they could probably knock off a couple hundred dollars of overhead and I tell him that it is still way over what we are able to pay.  Hell to the no.  To install a sink, faucet, and garbage disposal?  I dreaded telling Scott, but I told him right away and we were like what the heck do we do?  We are not going to have someone install this for twice as much as we paid for all of the parts.  And yes, we already had all of the parts, it was ONLY to install them.

The PROOF:

I told Scott we should do this ourselves.  The plumber basically told me what we would need to do by telling me what he was going to do.  WE CAN DO IT.  Young House Love does everything on their own and uses the people at Home Depot and YouTube to help them on their way.  Why couldn't we do that?  I have a not-so-secret desire to buy a semi fixer upper and fix it up ourselves.  Not like completely rat and termite infested fixer upper but more of a cosmetic situation where we could make it the style we wanted.  Our house already came with good paint colors and things so there was no reason to change much.  Except for the fact that if falls apart on occasion.  Scott texts me,  "Alright, here is the DIY project you wanted."  YAY!  Give me a challenge and I will do it.  From much research on both of our parts, watching YouTube videos, and an incredibly helpful person at Lowe's that told us what to use for the copper pipe cutting, the type of stop valves we would want to buy, and the kind of plumber's putty, we were on our way.

Stay tuned for the 2nd installment of Operation Sink, Etc.- Part 2.