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If you’ve looked at popular kitchens online or in stores, or in Melissa’s language, on Pinterest, you may have seen some apron sinks. This is one of her favorite inspiration pins:

We showed you our new stainless steel apron sink a few weeks ago, but since we just started working on cabinet installation this weekend, we hadn’t done much with it since then.

These types of sinks do look awesome, but they aren’t the easiest to install, and you should know that the cabinets don’t come ready to install the sink. In fact, even if you order a cabinet specifically for deep, apron front sinks, you’ll have to cut it to make it fit.

Because the sink base that we ordered is the full size of the sink base ( 36 inches ), we needed to modify the sink base a little more drastically than you might have to if you had chosen a smaller sink. It comes with a cutout that will fit a small sink and it is designed to fit up to a 36 inch sink, depending on how much you’ll have to cut off. That’s a part of buying stock cabinets from a dealer instead of having a carpenter make them custom for you.

You can see the types of sink bases Kraftmaid offers in the sheet below:

This is the one we went with. You can see it fits a range of sink sizes.

We also needed to lower the top of the sink base so that the top of the sink will sit under the counter-top because our sink was on the larger end of the range of sink depths this particular cabinet could accommodate.

So I started laying out my cut lines.

Melissa asked me about 10 times if I had double-checked my measurements. She’s a little protective of the new cabinets.

Once I had my lines, I used a straight edge and a box knife to score my cuts several times. This tip helps prevent tear out of the wood while cutting. It’s necessary if you want a really nice clean cut, as I’m sure you do considering you’re working with new cabinets, right? (Or old cabinets you want to look nice. Either way.) You can sort of see the scored line below:

(It looks lighter than the pencil line on the front since the mark had been partially cut away.)

After scoring the lines, I was ready to make the cut. I used the same straight edge as a fence for cutting, clamped on to the cabinet to give me a perfectly straight cut.

I used my circular saw.

I repeated this process one side at a time. Rotating the cabinet, and then clamping the straight edge down and made my cut.

Because the sink isn’t as deep as the cabinet,  I didn’t need to cut the base cabinet all around. Based on the sink installation instructions, the back of the sink should sit four and a half inches from the back of the cabinet. So that is where I stopped my horizontal cuts and made two vertical cuts to remove the piece.

I finished my cuts with a hand saw to prevent over-cutting.

Then, I carefully used the belt sander to get rid of any rough edges. You could, of course, use all hand tools for the cutting and sanding for this installation, but why not go for the power if you have them?

The sink fits in there perfectly, or rather pretty perfectly. Our sink is actually closer to 35 3/4 inches instead of 36, so we have a tiny cap on each side. We’re still deciding if caulk will be enough to fill that our if we’ll need another solution. But for now, this was a pretty good fit, and as close as it could be.

(Yes, we see the fingerprints. It’s the least of our worries right now.)

You can see the back edge of the cabinet where the plumbing will come up through the counter. I added a board on the wall to support the counter-top since it wouldn’t have anything to sit on back there.

I also had to cut out the back of the cabinet to make room for the plumbing.

 

It ended up needing to be a decent sized hole to fit everything in, but it won’t show.

I did, however, add a 2×4 to help brace the bottom of the cabinet where I made the cut.

We’ll be back with more details on installing cabinets later, but this was our first step because we wanted to make sure we had all the customizations ready to go before we screwed anything into the wall. It took us a few hours to get this one ready to go, but the others were a lot faster.

Ever had to tackle a harder-than-average installation job because you your wife liked the look of something special? Ever had to modify a sink base cabinet? This is our first time installing cabinets, so it’s been a learning process…