There, I fixed it - plumbing edition

One of these days I will get around to posting the epic project that we’ve undertaken of redoing our kitchen. It’s been about 4 months in the making and we’re hitting the final stretch! Last week the countertops were installed so we finally got our new sink installed. Unfortunately, the countertop guys don’t do plumbing, so that’s my job!

I had budgeted three trips to the hardware store, and I was right on the money! The problems I had to deal with in this particular plumbing experience were as follows:

• The new sink is DEEP! 10”, and mounted below the countertop. This is in contrast to the old sink which was 8” and mounted above the countertop. Since gravity needs to do work in plumbing, it was going to be close. I was unsure if I would be able to make the garbage disposal work in the configuration.
• The new sink has a single drain centered in the sink. This doesn’t seem like much of a problem, but it ended up being quite difficult.
• The dishwasher was setup to drain into a garbage disposal, which has a ³⁄₄” input port. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be able to make a garbage disposal work, meaning the dishwasher was going to have to drain into the sink drain directly.

Excited to get everything setup, we went to Home Depot on Friday night and got the stuff that I thought I would need to hook it up. Here was what I was able to do with that stuff.

So, back to Home Depot at 8:45 on Friday night. This time I got this accordion looking P-trap that allowed me to “float” the 1 inch difference between the drain tail pipe and the wall pipe. But it looked ugly. I wish I had a picture of it - but I was so angry at it by this time, I didn’t even think to take a picture. Let’s just say it sort of worked, but it looked terrible. And the “soak test” that I performed to it uncovered a very slow leak.

I was on the fence as to whether I should just throw in the towel and call a plumber, but I had one more attempt in me. This time, I went to Ace Hardware, my secret weapon in the DIY space since people are much more knowledgable and helpful. There I got what I think was the secret sauce. My problems that I had to overcome - the height of the P-trap was just a little too low because of the dishwasher in-port on the tailpipe… Also, the drain was still just an inch off of where the tailpipe could reach. What I really needed was a deeper, longer P-trap (or J-trap, not sure which is appropriate).

Well, such a thing didn’t exist at Ace - I’m not sure if it does exist in plumbing circles, but I ended up piecing together a solution that is working (knock on wood). What I ended up having to do is get a 45% angle piece that was threaded on both ends, then get another wall pipe. After cutting one of my wall pipes down to about 4” straight into the wall, connecting that to the 45% coupler, then cutting down the other wall pipe to just the bend, I was able to find an angle that made it all work together.

Plumbing is a pain in the butt!