Sinks
Bathroom sinks need to be neat and tough
Bathroom sinks have always been a bit of a design statement. Materials range from glass, ceramic and marble to stainless steel and limestone. They can be free-standing, wall mounted or pedestal style and all share the same fitting problem for the DIY plumber; how do you disguise the pipe-work? It seems that no matter how well you route the pipes, you can always see them when you lie in the bath or sit on the toilet. The answer is to make a feature of the hot and cold feed pipes and the waste. Most modern designs use bright stainless steel fittings which can look really elegant in their own right.
Whether you opt for the more expensive stainless steel bathroom sink fittings or go for conventional copper or plastic pipe-work it always make sense to ensure that the first fix plumbing emerges from the plasterboard (or floor) as close to the sink as you can make it. After all, unless you are going for a boiler-room theme, the fewer pipes visible, the cleaner your bathroom will look.If your sink is to be wall-mounted, remember that people can put an awful lot of pressure on the front edge. This means that the sink fixings (normally two very large screws or screw-bolts) should be extremely secure. Please don’t just drill a couple of holes, push in wall plugs and hope for the best. Make sure that the screws are located into sound material that can take the load. If your walls are dry-lined with plasterboard, there may be a small air gap between the board and the block-work behind. Here it’s best to prepare the mounting area by cutting back the plasterboard and either fit a timber mounting plate or render with a sand and cement mix.If you are fitting the sink to a stud partition wall, make sure there is a lateral timber directly behind the plasterboard where you intend to fix. As you will probably be removing the plasterboard to run pipe-work for the sink, this is a small additional job to do at the same time.Bathroom sinks are actually the simplest bathroom item to fit and you can make life even easier for yourself if you tile the splash-back before you fit the sink and fit isolator valves to the hot and cold feeds to make faucet washer changes easier one year down the line.