Godmorgon
I love IKEA. You can’t beat the prices and I think their reputation for low quality goods is undeserved. Many of the items we bought at IKEA has held up quite well in comparison to furniture that I we bought at Crate and Barrel.
And the design is wonderful. Even though we can afford to buy furniture from other places we always buy IKEA because we love the way it looks.
When it came time to redo our bathroom we decided to go with the Ikea GODMORGON Cabinet ($199 + extra for the legs) and mirror. The brilliant design allows you to have two full size drawers. It gives you tons of storage and comes with neat little dividers.
We chose a BRÅVIKEN sink to go with it ($179.00). The sink is really shallow and wide. Its an interesting design and very european/modern looking.
And for our faucet we chose GRUNDTAL ($89.99), a sleek faucet with a neat mechanism for turning the water on and off.
We started by assembling the cabinet. Pablo and I are pros at this by now and it went quickly and easily. I was impressed by the quality of the materials.
Then came time to connect it to our plumbing and this is where it all went very wrong.
We got under the cabinet and removed all of the old plumbing. I assembled the PVC pipes that came with the Braviken sink and realized very quickly that the pipes are much narrower than the metal ones that we had previously.
Stymied, I started assembling the faucet since I already know how to change a faucet. To my chagrin I realized that the connectors were not the same size as what I had previously AND the cords were too short!
I went to IKEAfans to see if any advice could be found and I found some posts warning people about the fact that the connectors will not work with American plumbing. You would think that IKEA would perhaps warn you of this! (And yes, I realize that the world is metric except the USA, but that is besides the point).
Here is what the drawing the manual looks like. As you can see there are no instructions on how to connect the end of the pipe (bottom left) to your plumbing. IKEA considers that to be 100% your problem. In their defense, everyone’s plumbing is different, so they have no way of knowing what you have.
I made a call to my local hardware store and they suggested that I try Brother’s Plumbing Supply in Elmsford.
I made the trip out and thankfully, they knew EXACTLY what to do. The Grundtal faucet has a 1/2″ IPS connector, my old sink uses 3/8″ compression fitting. So I needed an adapter/extension shown below. The brass part is the adapter which I guess allows me to connect the two female parts. The adapter is the webbed hose part.
Click to enlarge
And for the waste pipe I needed a reducing nut and washer. What you do is put the rubber washer on the smaller IKEA supplied pipe. Then put the nut on it. Screw the nut into the waste pipe that you have and voila, it fits!
Total cost of materials was $19.00.
And here is a pic of it all put together!
My final review on the sink/faucet/cabinet. The finished product is beautiful, but don’t buy it unless:
- Your hot/cold shutoff pipes are short. Ours protude 4.5 inches from the wall. Further out, and you will not be able to open and close the drawers in the Godmorgon cabinet.We were fortunate that our hot/cold pipes are relatively flush against the wall. If they had stuck out another inch or two the sink would not be touching the wall. And who wants a sink that is 1″ away from the walls?
- You are replacing something that is the same width as your current vanity. This goes for any sink. The faucet and the drain hole need to be located in line with your waste line.
- If the above don’t apply then you should be willing to hire a plumber to redo the pipes under the sink, move the plumbing etc…
Further reading: If you are more knowledgable at plumbing that I am (not hard!) then you might be interested in:
- Steve’s Blog – He explains how to install an Ikea faucet.
- Parkerman’s photos on Flickr – I found this on IKEAfans. He discarded the pipes that came with the Braviken and did it with American fittings.
PS Today, while at the plumbing store, I learned that this is not called a “Monkey Wrench”. Its called a pipe wrench. They guys at the store were both offended and amused that I used the term which is an anachronism.
