House travails

Sinks at Community Forklift
Originally uploaded by rllayman

You know that there are finish and rough carpenters... I guess the same can be said for plumbers. In a tizzy about getting a period-relevant sink, we bought a sink at the Brass Knob Warehouse. Unfortunately, the connections don't fully work. (It turns out that there are reproduction valves made and we will have to get at least one, for $245, which is more than half the cost of what we paid for the sink and seemingly working fixtures.)

But our plumber, who was very good at dealing with things like broken mains and replacing water heaters and fixing boilers, does not have the sensibility for fine and detailed work required when the fixtures aren't from Home Depot.

This kind of idea has been a sore point between my gf and I, because I am not always very articulate in explaining my bias against workpeople from the suburbs. It's about expectation, minimalism, historic preservation, and attitude, and people experienced with doing suburban work don't seem to understand craftsmanship when it comes to dealing with these kinds of questions.

In any case, it would have been cheaper to buy a reproduction sink for the bathroom. (Now if I can only convince her about my ideas for tiling...)

(Sinks at Community Forklift. But that's not where we bought the Crane Diana Sink I am complaining about.)

This is what we are trying to get working, although this isn't our sink, it's from the DEA Bath website -- it's a Crane Diana sink with Crane Drexel fixtures.