I have had an Astracast [composite] white sink for 10 years. The side with the disposer looks a little rough (when it has not been recently cleaned) because I did not read the manual that said to NOT use abrasive cleaners on it, and I used to Soft Scrub the dickens out of it. I also bleached it as the stains would set in because I dulled the polished bottom with my reckless scrubbing. I don't know what material it was made of (in 1999), but they are now made of a granite composite. I loved my sink because it had these grayish flecks in it that went so well with my new (at the time) laminate counters. The side with the strainer basket still looks white and nice. I did not abuse that side as much. There has been hair coloring in that sink and we have poured boiling water down the drain--without running cold water, we have washed paint brushes repeatedly, and poured untold amounts of chemicals down the drain. The drain (which was a plasticky white--what did I know?) has cracked, but the sink has not. One thing it does do, though, is show black marks from pans. That is why I used Soft Scrub on it so much. Those black marks drove me nuts. My hubby did manage to drop a sharp knife on it *just right* and it it made a little chip, which he covered with some sort of epoxy. Because of the pattern on the sink, you can hardly see his little fix. Unfortunately, he did that when the sink was fairly new, so I was plenty *shall we say* irritated with him! I am going with another composite sink in our remodel. An apron-front single bowl quartz sink. I am now aware of what NOT to do in one of those sinks, and the first thing I did was purchase one of those sink grids.

I purchased a Blanco precis under mount sink in 2010 for my kitchen. It is a beautiful sink. However this year, 2014 the sink cracked on the left side near the bottom curve....the crack continues to grow up the side and across the bottom. The sink leaks so we can't use it. We have a dishwasher and are not heavy users of the sink...so we're alarmed and surprised that it cracked after 4 years of use. We contacted Blanco Canada, who were very pleasant and they said that they no longer make the sink in white and gave us other color choices to replace our damaged sink under the lifetime warranty. We asked if there was another white or stainless sink model that we could substitute that would fit our cutout in the counter top...they said unfortunately not. They did not offer any other solution. Unfortunately our whole kitchen is pure white so the color options offered won't work. Our sink is undermount with Caesarstone countertops...so we have a problem. We contacted Blanco in the States...and have found the same sink in white which we have ordered. They went out of their way to be helpful. Denise Durken....their customer service person is wonderful. As far as cleaning is concerned. ..our existing sink was great for about 2 years. ..then it started staining...because our whole kitchen is white...the staining really shows. I have found the best solution is filling the sink with water and adding powdered oxyclean and letting it soak for hours. The sink returns to sparkling white. The stains return all too soon though. Between oxyclean treatments I use a stiff brush and Vim ...it does a good job. .but I worry about long term erosion of the surface. Overall I am disappointed with the fact the sink has cracked...and it is difficult to keep it white without a lot of work....because of the undermount issue we are compelled to use Blanco again . From a practicality point of view...i would probably order a dark color if I were to redesign my kitchen....i think there would be fewer cleaning issues.

Yesterday a contractor that HD recommended from a list called "Red Beacon" finished our upstairs guest bathroom. They recommend Red Beacon when the job is too small for one of their in house subs. It looks terrible. What a mess. Then he charged me way more than his bid. I didn't like the guy, just a weird dude, so I just paid him and told him how disappointed I was with the way he did it as in the grout lines were to be zero grout line and they are all different sizes up to a quarter of an inch when we agreed on an eighth of an inch. Not to mention he didn't put the tiles all running in the same direction of flow meaning the tiles have a directional pattern on them in the form of veins running through the marble. The tiles vary greatly in shading and he put darker ones all in a row and lighter ones randomly when it would have looked better to disperse them throughout. He didn't even install a threshold and had told me he would cut the tile in small rectangular pieces to meet the door jam but he ran the tile all the way to the entry and just cut off the edges and butted it against a thin metal strip and filled it in with grout. The tile cut isn't cut evenly so it's all running down hill as far as the butt joint against a metal strip. It isn't a metal threshold strip it's just a thin metal strip. I reminded him that he said he was going to do a threshold and he said oh yeah I did say that I don't know why I didn't and just shrugged. I told him I didn't think it looked good and would he like that in his house? He said no. I said what do you think we should do about it and he said that well if you ever have any other work in the future I could fix it then. What? I wanted to say there will never be another time. I paid him the full amount because we were alone in the house and I just don't need to be feeling like someone would do something to me or even say something to me that was really awful and with no witnesses here, he really could do/say whatever he wanted. It was so awkward. His skill level was just not up to doing this very small bathroom. I am not sure where to go from here. I don't want him coming back here. I can't even make myself go up there and look at it closely. It took him 3 long days to do 36 square feet of tile plus the side of a 5 foot bathtub and there was no tear out except for taking up that amount of carpet. I think I could manage getting over what I paid him but it's the materials that I am agonizing over. It was all Carrera marble tile and side splash on the face of the tub and a new Kohler toilet. I am starting to hate HDepot and Lowe's. Something always goes wrong when I have dealt with them and I don't know why they recommend people that don't have skill levels to meet even basic requirements. I honestly feel I could have done as good of a job. He also used three more boxes of tile than he estimated which would have been nearly half again as much as the space. I realize that setting tile on the diagonal takes more but not that much. So he bought more tile and I had to pay for that too. I cleaned up the driveway myself and there was so much wasted tile out there including some he was cutting in circles to place over the open trap for the toilet that smells so bad while working which I totally get but I had mentioned just setting a full tile on top of it as we have done in the past with the master remodel not cutting a custom tile piece just for the amount of time the drain was going to be open. Each tile costs several dollars and I saw at least three of them discarded when I was cleaning up I guess he was practicing on, not counting the ones that were upstairs. What is going on Home Depot?

Abbycat9990 - thank you for posting the picture of your beautiful kitchen! It looks gorgeous! Fieldser; I didn't get to check on here until last Monday when the granite guys were here! I am fine with the odd shape, but would have been really upset had I not noticed it before hand. I hope it's growing on you by now ;-) I have an unforeseen (on my part) issue related to the shape of the sink I guess! I am not ok with my faucet line up! The granite guys drilled holes in the granite along the line of the sink! So there are four holes, the first on the left is a little over an inch from the back splash and the fourth is a little over 1.5" the faucets don't follow the straight line of the back splash?! I'm trying to see if it bothers me now that the faucet & accessories are in place...they are each different in diameter at their base and so the depth / distance from the back-splash / the edge of the sink is less obvious now. Perhaps this is the standard thing to do, but I would have thought they'd have mentioned it to me before drilling! I didn't realize they'd done this until they were finished! If something is not going to be symmetrical then I want it to be *obviously* a-symmetrical! A statement. Not just slightly "off"! Being "slight" looks like a mistake to me! I'm a little ill to my stomach about it really. I am upset that they spent five minutes discussing the inches apart the faucet holes should go and yet made no mention of the line they should follow! I was stupid to assume it would be STRAIGHT! Arghhh. We had it installed as an undermount with a thin lip showing so that we could use the cutting board and accessories that came with the sink. Now we just need to get the carpenter to trim the board to fit! (Fingers crossed that'll work out). Oh, the other faux pas! The granite guys mounted the dishwasher to the underneath of the granite by glueing and bolting clips. Great... BUT - it's in crooked! "Miss Observant" wasn't too observant that day and I didn't notice this until an hour after they'd left my home! I think I was just too enamored with the new counter-tops! They've been supposedly "coming back" since Thursday! [rolling my eyes here] but haven't shown up *yet*! The right side of the dishwasher is not in line with the cabinet next to it and the left side sticks out and so the dishwasher door bangs into the cabinet when you are closing it! Nice one eh? I wish my husband had been here when they were installing. Not to sound like a feeble female but I think things would have been more thorough if he'd been here. I've never renovated a kitchen before now, so I didn't know the pitfalls/ potential for error! I am learning that in general people just don't give a rats a$$ - you need to ask lots of questions and you obviously need to stand and WATCH as everything is happening! I didn't want to hover too much so made myself busy when they were drilling (I think that was the worst time to leave the room)! They all arrive to your house, act like they are heaven sent, ask a few questions to play the game and appease you and then proceed to do as they damn well please! Amazing!