Replaced Kitchen Sink But...
One would think that any kitchen sink would be more durable to dings and bumps. Needless to say, I will never recommend a granite or quartz kitchen sink. I'm not even sure about granite or quartz for a bathroom sink... what if someone dropped something fairly solid and it hit the bathroom sink? I don't think I would take the chance. Just avoid granite and quartz sinks altogether... same with ceramic/terracotta and glass. Hmmm... I'm just thinking... we do have ceramic bathroom sinks now and we have yet to have a problem in there so perhaps granite and quartz would be fine for a bathroom sink.
To cover it again... back a few months ago... maybe a year or so ago... a heavy cast iron Dutch oven was bumped into the side of the larger basin of this big quartz sink. It chipped sort of like a windshield chips when hit by a rock at 65mph. It didn't crack but it chipped. All was fine until I was preparing our Christmas dinner. I was draining the pasta into a colander and the sink shattered with a very loud pop.
It shattered from the ding out in four directions. One of the cracks extended all the way down to the drain hole. Daylight could be easily seen in the cracks. At this point, I only had time to duct tape the sink so that it wouldn't leak. We would need to order a new sink the day after our Christmas celebration. In the interim, we would only be able to use the smaller basin. The duct tape was applied only to direct splashes from the smaller basin from leaking out of the sink and into our cabinet below.
The day after our Christmas celebration, Sheila and I did some online shopping. Although we love the look of black granite and black quartz sinks, we knew we needed something more durable. Even a ceramic coated cast iron sink wouldn't work because dropping anything in the sink would chip the ceramic coating. I didn't want any sort of chipping problems so we decided to go back to good old stainless steel.
The downsides to stainless steel are that is looks "too commercial" for a residential kitchen sink and the way it holds fingerprints drives me crazy. I hate the fingerprinting problem on stainless steel appliances too so I have no desire to go down the stainless steel appliance route. I'll just have to tolerate the stainless sink issues.
Three other things we wanted in a new stainless steel sink were a heavier gauge stainless steel, an extra deep basin, and a 60/40 double bowl split. This significantly narrowed down our search. We quickly narrowed our search results down to three sinks and then quickly eliminated two. We ordered it on Sunday and it arrived on Saturday evening.
In the meantime, I collected the tools I thought I might need as well as some extra plumbing parts I might need. Naturally, while installing the sink I quickly realized that I needed some other tools (which took a while to find) and that I was missing some plumbing parts necessary to connect both basins to the drain.
Other than missing some plumbing parts, the installation went fairly smoothly but we are, once again, left with the use of only one basin. Fortunately, I was able to connect the larger of the two basins this time. With the old sink, we were stuck using just the smaller basin so only having the larger basin this time is a bit of a step up.
Since we are in quarantine (our small Christmas gathering last Sunday - under 10 people in total - turned out to be a virus-spreading event), we are not able to run out to purchase the parts we need locally so I had to order the required plumbing drain parts from Lowes for delivery directly to our house. These parts won't arrive at our home until next Monday so I won't be able to complete this project until early next week.
In the meantime, we have a nice new, very large kitchen sink.
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