Sink Preferences: Tell me what you love, what you hate and why!

[politicat]

I have a fiberglass kitchen sink. White. Ugh. NEVER again. (What a waste of good fiberglass....) Hard to clean, hard to keep clean....

So tell me what you love.

[Longhorn]

1. Remodeling kitchens is my husband's bread and butter.

So he tears them out as well as install new ones. He says that stainless steel is the best, in his opinion, as long as it's a good quality. I haven't tried everything but of the sinks I have had, I prefer stainless steel.

[NMDemDist2]

2. I have had stainless, porcelain covered iron, corian and now Stilestone

of the batch i'd have to say they all have pluses and minus'

stainless is easy to care for but makes lots of noise with the GD or dropping stuff in there. they can be dented too which is a mess.

cast iron with porcelain takes a little more care, can be chipped but are quieter. they are heavy if you have to install them. the look is classic though

corian and stilestone are very easy care, have good sound deadening qualities and are hard to damage

of all the different materials, it is more important to me to have good sized bowls that are usable rather than what they are made of. Deep bowls that are wide enough for my big kitchen ware always had much more impact on my enjoyment of a sink than what the material was. with the exception of fiberglass which I agree is a disaster in the kitchen. They suck

[Warpy]

3. My favorite sink of all time was an enameled cast iron jobbie

I had in a triple decker in Boston. That thing had two bowls, one bowl being deep enough to receive the washboard back in the good old days before washing machines and when the kitchen had a coal range. It also had a nicely pitched drain board off to the side. I loved that sucker, ancient Victorian stains and all.

My least favorite sink is the double sink I had in my old trailer. It was stainless and too shallow to do much of anything, and even the addition of a high rise faucet set meant I was barely able to fill a spaghtetti pot in the damned thing. Forget filling my dyepots, I used the garden hose for them.

I have an enameled cast iron sink now and if I can find somebody to do my kitchen, I'm going to keep it. The look is in keeping with my late 40s kitchen and I don't mind polishing it once in a while. I've always hated the way stainless looks, it's dark and dreary to me.

I've never been posh enough to have one of those solid surface jobs. I don't think I'd like it. White sinks always look clean to me, even when they're not.

[AlCzervik]

4. ok i have a Corian sink right now and i'm sick of it, it comes clean but--

around the drains it never looks 100% clean, there is always a little discoloration there. I've had stainless before, and under mounted one with corian counters in my last house and i loved it, when i had to soak something the water always stayed hot longer than in my current one and you could always get that sink looking shiny again.

[Stinky The Clown]

5. Ok, I voted stainless, but only because I had to pick just one

I chose stainless because it is the most carefree and the most forgiving. The very nastiest can be brought back to a shiny new look (albeit with the normal patina of fine scratches).

Porcelain on cast iron is the gold standard, though. Quiet, durable, relatively easy to clean. The downside is chipping and, in maybe a half century or more, wear through of the finish.

Porcelain on steel is similar, but not as quiet, not as durable, and easier to chip. It can also dent.

The stainless and the porcelain on steel both need soundproofing on the undersides. This is a tar-like goo that you spread on the underside. It dries hard to the touch, so it never stays sticky. A good coat of it addresses a lot of the sound problems.

I'm not fond at all of fiberglass or acrylic sinks. The finish is very weak and gets dull with normal use.

Solid surface sinks (corian and the like) are fine, but can stain and sometimes show surface cracks at the drain fitting. When this happens, they just look nasty.

I've no experience whatever with silestone/zodiaq/etc. sinks.

On balance, I'll stay with stainless. I love my own extra deep, extra large custom sinks. You can drown a cat in them.

No Tigger, we love cats. It was a figure of speech.

[politicat]

6. There's a lovely cast iron with porcelain at the used materials lot here.

A couple of them, in fact. They're slightly bigger than the POS I have now, but we have saws. It's one with the huge basin and the smaller, "flatware" sink, and my friend has one of those that I love. (Even if it is Almond, and looks about 45 years old...) And it already has the sound-deadening on it.

I'm really thinking about it... I've looked at it three times, and if it's still there the next time I'm there, it's coming home with me.

[NMDemDist2]

7. that's what I did in PHX and I miss that sink!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=287&topic_id=1311&mesg_id=1342

[Warpy]

8. That high rise faucet is an absolute necessity for me

it's the only way I can fill my big dyepot.

Before I got it, it was the garden hose, not practical in midwinter.

[NMDemDist2]

9. yeah, that was one of the first purchases here too

and I like this one cuz it has a hose that pulls out tooo

[eleny]

10. cast iron with porcelain

quiet and pretty. i have one large basin and one small on the side. when i replace it, it'll be with the same. or maybe i can just get it refinished.

[Stinky The Clown]

11. You'll be disappointed with a refinish job

All they do, essentially, is paint it with a super high quality, high build, catalysed paint. While as tough as paint can be, it isn't anything even close to the same as the original high fired porcelain. The porcelain is closer to a glass than a paint.

[Mist]

12. My experience is mostly with porcelain and stainless--porcelain, in the

places I've rented, has been older, and a bit chipped. When it gets older it tends to get dirty FAST. I had one sink that seemed to get dingy if I looked at it too hard. Also bad for glass and dish breakage. Stainless seems perfect in comparison--doesn't age too fast, easy to clean, good prices. When I finally get a house, I'll make sure I get a stainless sink, if it doesn't already have one. I actually had a funny sink in one place where the landlord had done a fly-by renovation--that sink seemed to be plastic of some kind, and actually puckered a bit when I put a hot pan in it one evening. I think it was supposed to be a gardening sink, not a kitchen sink. Knowing that landlord, he probably got it for next to nothing.

[politicat]

13. we have one of those - called a laundry sink.

And yes, I use it mainly for repotting plants or dyeing fabric. It's even worse to clean than the fiberglass jobbie, but since I don't use it a lot, and I use it for dyeing, I don't care much.