Tuesday, January 29, 2008

A sinking suspicion we're screwed

Ha! Sorry...a "Dad" joke. I couldn't resist. You'll see what I mean...

I mentioned yesterday that we ended up with a bit of a sink dilemma when we were putting the new countertops on the cabinets. I'm hoping someone out there has some ideas (perhaps from personal experience? C'mon-- help me out; I want company in my misery).

A couple of weekends ago we put the plywood base down on the existing cabinets. Two things happened. One, is that we cut the hole for the sink so that it was flush to one side-- this left no lip of counter on which to screw our sink clips. Secondly, the vertical partitions of the actual cabinets were a little too thin in some places to really screw the plywood into place.

Our solution: One by one strips of wood. We screwed 1x1s to some of the sides of the partitions to have a base to receive the screws, and put one on the inside of the sink cabinet to create a lip. We put the sink in to make sure it fit-- it did-- and went on our way.


You can probably see where we're going with this.

After we laid out the tile for positioning, we put the sink in its hole to make doubly sure it fit and to see how it all looked.

And it looked good. Except, when I looked under the sink, I noticed that the clips seemed to be up awfully high. Adam got one out of the box and tried to hook it on. That's when we realized that we hadn't taken into account the added height of the backer board, tile, AND mastic.

We considered taking this piece out; however, its matching piece on the other side of that partition/wall thingy is screwed into it. And this doesn't solve our problem on the other side of the sink, since the actual counter is screwed into that piece. And then we'd still have nothing to clip to.

So here's what we're thinking: We looked around online for sink clip extensions or extra long sink clips-- this is where I discovered that we are NOT the only people this stupid and that no one has taken on the task of inventing such a thing. I'm adopting these as my new million dollar idea-- so don't steal it from me! We then considered fabricating something just like these clips, but longer, out of...something...metal...?

Or, we're likely to use a wood spade drill bit to rout out a space just deep enough to handle the clips.

Any solutions/anecdotes/miracles?????

4 comments:

EGE said...

I don't have any solutions, sorry. I actually wasn't present for the whoops-we-effed-up portion of our countertop extravaganza. But I do have LOADS of sympathy!

Sandy said...

What about tiny C-clamps? Would they work? Or maybe L-brackets? I really am trying help!

Amalie said...

Ooooh! Modifying some L-brackets might do the trick...Thanks!

Anonymous said...

You are on the right track using the spade bit to hog out a space for the clips to attach to. Thats likely how I would do it. You could also use a chisel to hollow out a recess for each clip or use a router to cut a slot with a slot cutter bit. The advantage of the last method is you have more flexibility on clip placement. Let me know if you need any more help. (Tile looks good BTW)
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