Fixing the Toilet Thursday 12/29/2005

Truly, many things happened other than toilet-fixing on this day. I took a photo of a row of shiney palm trees that I thought was going to be my photo of the day. But it ended up feeling like this was what it was all about.

The tank in the guest bathroom has been running for something like a week. We’d just turned off the water tap behind it and ignored it for a while. But friends are coming to stay the night for New Year’s Eve, so we thought we’d better get to it. So glad we didn’t wait for Saturday morning to start this.

This is an essential difference between the much-heralded D and I. He likes to wait until the minute before the last minute. I like to get my chores done first so they don’t bother me. Outstanding chores seem to have no emotional or psychological effect on D whatsoever. I might like to try this philosophy out sometime, but the mere thought of the consequences makes me shiver.

He did most of the work on this because it had lots of complicated little parts, and it’s a somewhat confined space, and I’m really really lousey at sitting around waiting to be asked to hand some one the pliers. So I tidied the rest of the house and stayed in earshot so I could help when I was really needed. To double check the assembly, to hold them steady while he tightened the bolts that secure the tank to the base. We replaced all the working parts instead of just trying to figure out which little gizmo was messing up. The works are probably as old as the house, which was built in 1989. Not so long ago in terms of houses, but pretty long for little plastic and metal parts that are constantly emmersed in water.

He got the whole thing back together and was hooking up the tap to the tank, when the worn out metal tube sprung a leak. Long story short, we had to turn off the water to the whole house. And drive 10 miles into town for a replacement part. Which the nice man told D didn’t need a washer. Just teflon tape.

My new plan is that we always buy a washer whether we need it or not. The twenty-seven cents is much cheaper than the gas to drive into town and back for the washer the nice man said we didn’t need.

I have a nice place to store unused washers, in baby food jars neatly arranged inside an old library cardfile. (Gee that sounds obsessively neat, and you’d be amazed at the mess that the house gets into. But I digress.)

D drove back to town to get the washer (another 20 miles round-trip) while I tried to keep being productive, but then I found the Medicine Cards (a divination set) that I’d thought I’d lost maybe forever, and did a centering spread and found out that… Well, anyway, I was very helpful when he got back, running in and out of the house repeatedly to turn on and off the water from the main supply. The washer did the trick, but then there were little leaks from other places.

Every half hour or so he’d go in and tighten something a little more. You have to be careful because you can crack the porcelain tank. The instructions say that you should only hand-tighten the various washered connections from the bottom of the tank, but there’s no way that this is effective in creating the kind of seal you need. I think you have to use wrenches, but they won’t tell you that because they don’t want you to call them when you bust the tank into seventeen pieces because you got a little over-zealous.

When in town in the midst of this, we took ourselves out for a very nice sushi lunch, congratulating ourselves that we’d saved a lot more than the cost of lunch by not calling a plumber. True. Lunch and the parts were probably half what a plumber would have charged. Of course, we could have saved the price of the lunch, but what kind of incentive is that, I ask you?

Oh good grief. Did I just write 707 words on fixing the toilet? Yes, I did. I checked it on Word.

Well, anyway, here’s a nice picture of the rejuvenated tank, which I added sunset hues and a poster effect to with Photoshop. Isn’t that romantic?