I love our kitchen sink. This may sound completely ridiculous, but some days I can’t get over how much I love it.
Have you ever thought about what a big role your kitchen sink plays in your life? Think of how many hours you spend in your kitchen doing dishes, washing fruits and veggies, filling pots, pans, and buckets with water; maybe you even bathe your baby in it (I do!).
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Before we bought our current kitchen sink, I never thought much about it. I thought I knew what kind I wanted, but I was wrong. Turns out we accidentally bought the perfect sink by thinking that we were compromising.
Okay. Maybe perfect is a slight exaggeration. There is one thing I’d change about our sink— I’d like it to be under the counter — but that’d require new countertops which will likely accompany a kitchen remodel and that’s YEARS down the line, so in the meantime, I really just love our kitchen sink.
What’s so great about it?
It’s really very simple. It’s a single basin sink and it’s 8” deep. This may not sound special, but let me tell you about how this beats out the double basin and its 6” or 10” deep counterparts.
The single basin:
The single basin is surprisingly wonderful. If you currently have a double basin, what do you use your secondary basin for and what state is it in? If it looks anything like ours did, it houses a dish rack that’s never fully used nor ever really emptied and is primarily used to hold a colander when draining pasta. The dish rack is a little funky (not the good kind of funky) and sometimes you avoid using the sink because of the mounting dishes or because it, too, is a little funky (because cleaning it would mean you’d have to put away all the dishes).
Secondly, a single basin means no median.
Think about the median splitting your sinks. It’s probably 1”-2” wide and its presence renders about 1” on either side of it relatively useless, killing about 4” of sink width. Again, what do you use this space for? I just remember awkwardly rinsing dishes over it. If I was doing dishes, I had to hope not to splash suds onto the clean dishes, and if I wanted to fill a glass of water while doing dishes, I had to be careful not to run cold water into the hot dish water. This may not seem like a big deal, but in hindsight, it’s really annoying.
Thirdly, doing dishes in the fixed sink space is grungy.
Dish water is gross and after you do dishes you always have to clean that nasty, bacteria-ridden film off the sides. Heaven forbid you need to switch out the water mid-wash, meaning you have to clean out the sink twice (or more). And if you have one of those rubber mats in the bottom of your sink? Ugh! So much extra time cleaning so you can clean.
We simply keep a large, old plastic bowl under the sink and pull it out for dishes or to soak fruits and veggies. This has its advantages over the fixed sink space, because if you need to wash your hands or quickly rinse something, you can do so on the other side of sink, in the lost median space, or you can move the bowl out of your way entirely. Also, if you need to switch out your dish water, you just dump it, give the bowl a quick swirl of clean water, and refill. This saves time as you can just clean out the sink at the end when you’re cleaning up the rest of the sink area — ya know, when you’re supposed to do it. It also saves water because no matter how big your bowl is, it’s still likely smaller than your sink.
Lastly (and probably the most obvious reason), the single basin gives you room to soak and clean large objects: griddles, woks, extra large pans — and all without angling, wedging, or layering dishes. This also leaves room to splash, ‘cause cleaning is never a clean affair. 🙂
So that’s all the things I love about the single basin, but there’s one thing that I haven’t addressed yet: Drying.
We dry our hand-washed dishes on a towel on the counter, but if you’re not into this option, there are a few drying rack options available that will work with a single basin sink. There’s the rollout over-the-sink rack if you’re looking for something that doesn’t take up much space; there’s an over-the-sink version of your standard in-sink drying rack; or there are fancy, over-the-entire dish area drying racks that I’m pretty sure would just replace my cupboard if I had one.
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I think these are all pretty great options depending on your preferences.
Next? Sink depth.
Even if you’re not sold on the single basin, you’ll still need to consider depth for your new sink. For reference, a standard sink is 6” deep. A 10” deep sink has a lot of appeal. It seems like a great way to add sink space and reduce splash, but one thing I’m guessing you haven’t considered is that a 10” sink is a huge backache. A 2” difference may not sound like much, but when you’re hunched over a sink doing dishes after a well-attended dinner party, it makes a substantial difference. In all seriousness, the extra depth is something you may quickly regret, especially if you’re tall. I spoke with a friend who’s an interior designer and she said that a lot of people jump at the 10” deep sink, but that she generally warns against it for this very reason. I’ve done dishes in a 10” deep sink; it’s a backache waiting to happen.
Like I stated above, we have an 8” deep sink. Our purchase of an 8” sink was a wonderful accident as, at the time, we were unaware of the backaches of a 10” deep sink and were about to purchase one when we saw an otherwise identical 8” deep sink on the clearance rack for half the price. We thought we were compromising. It was truly a happy coincidence.
There’s one more thing I feel like I should discuss: hardware. I’ve linked to a couple of faucet models in our chosen style below, but I’m guessing that this probably isn’t as hard of a sell as the single basin sink. Maybe I should just save it for different post on another day.
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What are your thoughts on sinks? Do you love what you have?
Tell me about it below!
— Funky Crunchy Mama
