Necessity is the mother of invention

Or: How we got this crazy heavy sink out of the kitchen and onto the deck.

I’m writing this Sunday morning. The cabinets are being installed and I’m mostly hiding because I don’t really care for the messy/scary parts.

But rather than leave you totally hanging on a kitchen update, I thought I’d share a little item about how to get things done when you have get things done.

One thing I’ve learned from my adventures in DIYing various things, is that the worst-case scenario is almost never as bad as it seems so you can almost always recover a project from failure. This has led me to come up with some pretty bizarre and creative solutions to problems. Mr. Much More Patient often shakes his head at whatever crazy method I come up with do something. But you know what? It usually works.

However, I surprised even myself with the stroke of genius I had yesterday when we found ourselves in a major pickle of the demolition variety. We had removed all the old cabinets other than the sink cabinet. In our way was the cast iron sink. I don’t know how much that particular sink weighs, but I looked up a similar sink online that is 125 pounds. That is a lot of weight for one relative weakly plus Mr. Much More Patient to lift up in the air (to clear the bottom of the sink from the cabinet). First we called a strong relative but he wasn’t available to help and the person who was taking the cabinets was on her way back to pick up the rest. It was time to get creative.

We entertained the idea of a car jack but we figured it would go through the bottom of the cabinet. Then I laid in the bottom of the cabinet and pushed up, but my short arms only bought us a couple extra inches before I maxed out. But in theory it worked.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. I was going to have to do my best man-in-a-box impersonation and get in there. I might not have a lot of upper body strength but I do have pretty good leg strength. Also, my legs are longer than my arms, although probably not by much. After a quick change into sweatpants (there was no force on earth that was going to allow me to crunch up into that small of a ball with jeans on), I crammed my entire body into that cabinet and gave a big ol’ push with my legs. Mr. Much More Patient pulled from the top and balanced it on the edge of the cabinet while I snuck out of the cabinet to grab and edge so we could carry it out on the deck.

That sink will be going back in temporarily while we wait for the new counters to be installed but we’ll definitely be calling in stronger help for that. I don’t think the legs work in reverse.