This Space for Rent

Just in case –

You do know that the usual solution to unwanted cast iron fixtures and stairs is a brisk whack with a sledge? The pieces are ever so much less awful as things to lug than the whole. (Particularly notable in the case of bathtubs, but that sink looks like it might qualify.)

Well, my grand plan is to relocate the sink either into the garage or the basement (it’s not a self-rimming sink, but some sort of bizarre under-the-counter porcelain and cast iron sink) so I can have a working sink arrangement there. So giving it the old sledgehammer tap of love would not be a good plan.

If it’s one of those, getting it out intact is likely to be fun. (The kind I’m thinking of have an L or J section lip that interacts with the counter.)

Good luck, and do please try to make it a two man lift come the day.

Oh, the counter was something special. The people who wanted to make the stupid room into a kitchen were sort of like me; they had far more enthusiasm than actual formal training. The counter was made out of tongue and groove floorboards (softwood, I think) which had a rectangular hole chopped out of the middle of them, and to get a nice round hole for the sink to sit under, they took a piece of aluminum edging and formed it into an oval and glued down a sheet of vinyl flooring as the countertop (which was rolled up into a backsplash by the simple solution of nailing a 45° wedge of wood to the back of the counter, then rolling up the vinyl without actually touching that chunk of wood, unless it manage to graze the quarter inch of glue that was slathered onto it. )

An interlocking connection was, um, just a little bit too sophisticated for this room.

You can’t see it (because I nailed a brace to the front of the cabinet) but the sink is held up by a pair of cleats nailed to the sheets of plywood that make up the cabinet sides, and as far as I can tell the only thing holding those plywood sheets together is that the cleats are nailed to a stud that runs across the back of the sink box. (Well, that and the brace; I was just imagining the two pieces of plywood pulling apart and the sink toppling forward with an earthshattering crash at about 2am, and I think the brace might stop that from happening for enough time for me to hire my neighbor to cut and cap the water lines down in the basement, so I can reroute them into the downstairs bathroom where they might actually be useful.)

Notice how they didn’t bother to even fill in around where they cut the holes in the wall for the water and waste pipes? Now that’s the sort of craftsmanship you won’t find everywhere.

That’s impressively ad-hoc, all right. (A friend’s rental apartment has a sink installation that looks like that under the counter; the holes are covered with tapped-on aluminum foil, and not the heavy duct-sealing kind either.)

If that was intended to be a free-standing sink, I’d figure the edges would be much more rounded in profile, and wider in the bargain. So it’s possible it is, if not self-edging, meant to go on top of the associated counter.