By Matt Fox
Home & Garden Television
Recently on our program, Room by Room, a small half bathroom posed a challenge for Shari and me. The old sink had seen better days and was ready for the trash dumpster. But I think I came up with a pretty neat solution; I replaced the sink with my own homemade rustic cabinet, a new stainless steel drop-in sink and new faucet.
After turning off the water at the main water valve, I removed the old sink and plumbing and started tackling the new cabinet.
I wanted to build a base and use a drop-in sink because I thought the old sink left very little room for day-to-day use.
The base of the cabinet is made up of 2-x-4 foot boards that I measured and cut to fit into the recess area of the room where the old sink was located. First, I used a level and tape measure to determine the height of the counter top.
I went to a few home center stores to look at ready-made cabinets and found that there really is no standard height.
In fact, the height can vary from about 32 inches to almost 36 inches because more people — especially men — are asking cabinet manufactures to raise the counter height in bathrooms to the same height as kitchen counters.
Keeping that in mind, I decided to place my height at 36 inches because the man of the house will be using this room more often.
Once I drew a level line, I attached 2-x-4 foot boards to the wall using lag screws secured into studs that I located with a stud finder. For the bottom of the cabinet I placed the 2-x-4s directly onto the wall above the floor and attached with lag screws into the wall.
I made the finished counter surface from 1-x-4-foot boards of pine. So to give myself extra support and a surface to which to attach the boards, I cut a piece of particleboard to fit into place. Once that was in position, I needed to locate where my sink and faucet would be.
The sink manufacturer supplied a template to help with the sink placement. Once I found center of the particleboard, I was able to trace around the template and cut out the hole with a jigsaw.
After that, I located the placement of the faucet, reserving enough space for the back splash, and drilled out holes using a spade bit so the plumbing of the faucet could be pushed through.
Before I could put the sink or the faucet in, I needed to finish the top. To do this, I cut 1-x-4-foot boards of pine the width of the counter top. I pre-stained all the boards with a distressed look to go with the style of the bath and the rest of the house.
Then I attached them to the particleboard subsurface with construction adhesive and screwed the surfaces together from underneath the particleboard. After the adhesive dried, I went back with my sink template and cut out the hole through the pine boards to match the hole in the particleboard.
Once templates were matched and cut, I finished the top by attaching my backsplash and side pieces, patching the nail holes with wood putty and then painting the entire cabinet and with three coats of water-based polyurethane.
To complete the project I installed the sink and faucet and attached the plumbing.
(Matt Fox writes this column with Shari Hiller. They also co-host the Home & Garden Television show Room by Room. For more information, visit HGTV.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)
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