Build Your Own Rustic Sink

Recently, a small half-bathroom posed a challenge for me. The old sink had seen better days and was ready for the dumpster. But I think I came up with a pretty neat solution: I replaced the sink with a homemade rustic cabinet, a new stainless steel drop-in sink and new faucet. Here’s how I did it:

• After turning off the water at the main water valve, I removed the old sink and plumbing and started tackling the new cabinet.

• I used a level and a tape measure to determine the height of the countertop. 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 would be using this room most often.

• Once I’d drawn a level line, I attached 2-by-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 attached the two-by-fours directly to the wall above the floor with lag screws.

• I made the finished counter surface from 1-by-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.

• 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.

• Then I located the placement of the faucet, reserving enough space for the backsplash, 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-by-4-foot boards of pine the width of the countertop. 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 the hole through the pine boards to match the hole in the particleboard. I finished the top by attaching my backsplash and sidepieces, patching the nail holes with wood putty, and 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.

  
  (Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)