Brooke here:

The vacation from home repairs is over (so, so sad).  Today, while I slashed away at the overgrown 14-foot hedges, Brown replaced the kitchen sink.

When we gutted our old place to prepare it for sale, we left the kitchen sink until last and regretted it.  Changing a sink is a relatively minor thing but it has as much effect on the entire room as putting in a new oven or fridge, so replacing the sink in the new house was on the priority list (plus the back of the faucet kept falling off and drizzling water all over the counter but for us, such things are the new normal).

Brown turned off the water, removed the plumbing and disposal, and ripped out the old sink.  I took off the trim, painted the boards behind the sink, and scraped up the old caulk with a razor.  Then I ran a bead of new caulk around the edge of the sink; the clear caulk vanished in the move so I had to use biscuit, and when I ran the bead I dropped it into the cavity to keep the color from bleeding out under the edge of the sink.

The enamel on the new sink was cracked and there was a two-inch section on the back where the enamel had flaked off.  We couldn’t find the receipt so I repaired the damage using a jar of black automotive paint from Honda that I use to touch up dings on my Civic.  I was patting myself on the back for getting the color matched perfectly on the first try, then felt quite dumb that I was congratulating myself for matching “shiny black” to “shiny black.”  The damaged section is all but gone, though.

Brown then installed the new sink.  It’s a Kohler cast iron monster.  He went through the box a couple of times to find the clips that keep the sink attached to the counter and fixed in place, then realized that clips aren’t needed as an eighty-pound sink isn’t going to wander when someone chucks a pan in it.

He reattached the do-hickeys, did a couple of leak checks, and bam!  New sink, plus new faucet and soap dispenser.

The installation was going rather smoothly until Brown pointed out the loose wire.  It’s just a wire.  It goes nowhere.  It sticks out of the wall and had an uncapped end directly under the place where you go to get water.  Brown tested it to see if it was a live wire, and while it doesn’t seem to be, he still taped the end and capped it.  For safety’s sake, you know, because it was an exposed wire around water.