So the big job today was to pull the sink. This is the sink; by the time I took this picture I had already removed the doors from the front of the vanity to make getting at the rest of the thing easier:

I’ve never actually disconnected a sink from a wall, mind you, so (much like every other step in this process) I’m being real careful to make sure not to fuck anything up along the way.  First step in pulling a bathroom sink is to turn off the water. I didn’t get a picture, because cutting the water to the toilet was a piece of cake.  The shutoff valves for the sink, on the other hand, were 1) stuck and 2) started crumbling in my hand when I tried to apply a bit more force to them.

I don’t know much, but I know when I’m about to make a big mistake, and shearing the shutoff valve sure as shit sounded like a big mistake.  So, maybe ten minutes into the big job of the day, I called a halt and called a plumber.  That was at maybe 9:00 this morning or so; it’s 3:15 now and the plumber left about half an hour ago, so yay for folks who can get out quickly.  The plumber disconnected the sink for me and replaced the shutoff valves, all the while swearing at the shitty plumbing job the builders had done– which is not the first time I’ve heard that.  Every plumber who has ever entered this house has left wanting to travel back in town and beat hell out of the dude who built the place.

There was some careful examination of the way the sink attached to the vanity, because it looked like the most obvious way to pull the sink out had a good risk of dropping it through the countertop, potentially wrecking my new shutoff valves.  This seemed bad.

So I went with the second most obvious way, and just grabbed the countertop and yanked. Amazingly, it worked:

Just in case you were wondering if this was a quality vanity or not:

And then we pulled the rest of the thing, and the swearing started, and the swearing really hasn’t stopped yet; I’m actually swearing uncontrollably under my breath while I’m typing this, because this fucking bullshit was what was under the vanity:

Make sure you look closely, there, and note that several of the long broken pieces on the right there actually match missing pieces elsewhere on the tile, meaning that they tried to pull up the tile, gave up quickly, and then just threw the shit under the vanity.

Also, five will get you twenty that that’s asbestos tile, and it’s also a good quarter-inch lower than the rest of the floor, meaning I have to redo my flooring plan again.  I’m hoping I can just find a piece of plywood of the right size and slap the fucker in place, because otherwise I’m going to have to pull the entire floor, because unless I miss my guess those tiles are made of cancer.

Take a wild guess how happy I am right now.