When to Replace a Sink or Shower

A home renovation expert with more than 50 years of experience, Handy Man Repairs, Inc. CEO David Carter is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and Georgia College. Now working in Philadelphia, Mississippi, he commonly coaches homeowners through the confusing process of kitchen and bathroom renovations. Here, he tells us when it is time to replace a worn out sink or shower.

The pricing has come down so much lately on the actual fixtures that homeowners need to buy in order to replace an entire sink or faucet that it is actually often more cost-effective to replace a whole fixture than to try and repair a leaky valve or faucet. When you look into overhauling your sink or shower, it is surprising how much cheaper it can actually be to buy all new appliances.

By the time you replace the stems and seals on valves, I can already bet that it will be more expensive than buying an entirely new sink. That’s why I commonly tell homeowners they should just go ahead with an overhaul. The same thing applies to toilet seats, which are often just as expensive to replace as the entire toilet itself.

To give homeowners an example of this, when you look into replacing a kitchen sink, a nice new sink can be bought for $25. Whereas if a handyman came in and work on fixing the stems and all the other problems that were going wrong with your old sink, that would be a lot more expensive and time-consuming. Not only that, but the finished product would still probably not be as durable as if bought an entirely new fixture.

For a lot of homeowners, it becomes time to replace a sink or shower just when they decide to upgrade for personal reasons. Maybe they want a nicer version or a new style—these homeowners know what they want, and that is a perfectly reasonable reason to replace and old fixture.

When you get more into talking about replacing sinks, I actually had one lady who had a stainless steel double basin sink. Unfortunately, that sink was not deep enough and it began to corrode. The sink itself was a 22 gauge, when really what she needed was an 18-gauge sink that would have been much more heavy duty. In fact, I believe an 18 gauge would have been almost twice as thick. So in that instance, working with that particular client, her sink itself was just the wrong type for what she needed. And instead of wasting money and time working on it, she just decided to get a new one that was a better fit for her kitchen.

The same thing applies to the shower, too. You have got people who have showers made of fiberglass. If they are experiencing some leaking between the seams of the shower, then the options are to fix the leaking or replace the shower. Well, just fixing the leaking—which seems like a small job—could require me to get into the backer board behind the shower if I am going to really seal the area properly. So, once again, in cases like that, you are really better off replacing the whole glass around the shower rather than trying to fix the small problem at the seams. It just makes financial sense.

One reason I think people don’t replace their sinks and showers more frequently is because they don’t realize how quick a job like that really is. For the most part, I can get in and out of a client’s home on a sink or shower replacement project in just a matter of hours. And that includes replacing the sink, the fixtures, and everything else. A shower might take a little longer, depending on how complex it is, but rarely do I ever have to shut down a client’s bathroom for more than six hours at a time.

So for most people, projects like this can be done in a weekend or less. When it comes to replacing older sinks and showers, it is a job where I can be in and out in the same day. Unless we are doing massive tiling in a bathroom, pretty much none of the jobs I take on last more than a day, which is nice for people who can’t go without their bathroom or kitchen for an extended period of time.