Plumbing in Paradise: Installation of the New Kitchen Sink

There is nothing fancy about the sink we brought with us to install in the cabana kitchen. But it is made of a heavier gauge stainless steel and the double basins are just slightly larger than the old sink. The faucet, with its brushed nickel finish, solid metal construction, single lever, and spritzer, is much nicer than the old plastic piece of junk. Below is Dennis holding the old sink and faucet that he has just removed from the cabinet.

Even though the basins were slightly larger and at least an inch deeper than the existing sink, we thought the footprint for the countertop cutout was identical. Once Dennis scraped all the old caulking off, we could test that by dry-fitting the new sink.

It fits! Yea!!! First hurdle is cleared.

Then Dennis fitted new strainer units into the sink basins with plumber’s putty and secured the tailpieces of the drains. Time for another dry-fit to see if the tailpieces match up to the location of the drain pipes. Yes and no. Yes, they lined up to the same spots. No, they were much too long. What to do, you may ask. ;-) Dennis took the old tailpieces off the old sink and used them to get a closer match and made up the difference with the play in the PVC drain pipe.

The water supply, which uses flexible IPES tubing, was easier to connect. Or was it? Turns out the connector that Dennis brought down here with us was defective, so again, he scavenged parts from the old sink until he can replace it with newer material. Not having a hardware store within easy reach brings makes one resourceful. ;-) (We were ale to buy the proper piece when we went on our 6 hour round trip to the village of Independence for supplies. Dennis will replace that today while I am posting this from an internet café in the slightly larger village of Placencia.)

Now for the real installation. Dennis filled the channels on the underside of the lip of the sink with silicone caulking and we carefully lowered the sink into place. From underneath, he tightened the clips that hold the sink firm to the countertop. In the photo below you can see the excess caulking that was squeezed out when the clips were tightened.

And finally, the sink fully installed.

Just look at the single lever faucet and wonderful spritzer! We get excited by the simplest things here in Englishtown. And as David from “Adventures in Paradise”  (http://winjama.blogspot.com/)   will tell you, it is truly plumbing in paradise when you can complete a job in a single day with just a handful of hyphenated words to color the air blue!