I hate toilets. Or, for my from-downstate readers, terlets. They are not nice appliances, which I think is a result of having to do such a dirty job. If you had to handle the vast amount of waste that I produce every day, not to mention periodically have to stare up at my winking browneye, I think you’d be a little surly as well. Which is why they try to break and operate inefficiently as much as possible.
We have two in our house, one on the entry level, and one on the top floor near the bedrooms. The one downstairs malfunctioned first; about 6 months ago, the connection between the flapper (which keeps the water in the upper tank and flips upward when you want to flush, releasing all the water into the bowl) and the handle broke. On most toilets it’s a sturdy piece of chain, but on this particular commode it was a piece of plastic, and it meant I had to replace the whole flapper instead of just replacing the chain.
The new flapper I bought turned out to be pretty crappy (forgive the pun); once installed, you either had the option of holding it down for several seconds in order to ensure everything flushed away, or flush normally and deal with the issue of floaters. This was a problem because 1) I’m not smart enough to remember to hold it down when trying to rid myself of a nasty deuce, and 2) I’m definitely not smart enough to remember to advise guests how to do it. So I finally broke down and replaced it with a more expensive flapper; this new one actually has a dial in it so you can control how much water is used when the toilet is flushed. Since I’m not a hippie and I regularly produce butt-biscuits that would choke a whale, I set it to the max.
The upstairs toilet was more complex, and the story actually starts with the sink, which had developed a serious clog. I took apart the trap and cleaned out the hair (just a nasty, nasty job) and all was well. Unfortunately, to gain access to the trap, I had to sit on the other toilet, and apparently all my sink-trap-related jostling loosened the toilet from its base. With moist results. A slow leak developed that put about 1/8″ of water over 2/3 of the bathroom floor, so I turned off the connection to the upper tank, and gave it a few flushes to drain it as much as possible. Then I consulted a toilet expert (my brother-in-law) and he said I probably needed to replace the wax seal. This didn’t sound difficult, so I went to Lowe’s and picked one up.
When I got home, I began trying to unbolt the toilet from the floor, and ran into an issue. The bolts holding it on were a bit rusty, which wasn’t unexpected, but the fact that the heads underneath weren’t well secured was; I couldn’t loosen the nuts on the top because the bolts were just spinning freely. And I didn’t have any way of getting underneath to grab the bolt because there was a 75+ pound toilet sitting on it. I figured I could replace the bolts, so I decided to cut them, which is when I realized I had left my Dremel tool in the back of Brian‘s car after using it to help him cut a space for his new CD changer. Argh.
So, I had him drop off the Dremel, and got to cutting. I got the left-hand bolt off easily, but the right one was more problematic; due to its proximity to the wall, I couldn’t get in there to see what I was doing, so I couldn’t get the right angle to cut the bolt beneath the nut. In the end I managed to cut through the nut, but only after cursing a fair bit and chipping away a sizeable area of porcelain. Then I lifted the toilet off and set it aside.
What was underneath was one of the nastiest things I have ever seen. Mushed up wax and fecal matter surrounded a dark hole in the floor. I lack a proper putty knife, so I began scraping the wax and goo off the floor with my bare fingers, periodically pausing to retch for a while and choke back bile. After a while, I had all but bare traces of the poopwax off the floor, and began to wipe down the whole area with some disinfecting wipes, which turned out to be a bad idea, because I accidentally pushed a small piece of porcelain into the baseboard, and it pushed back. Into my skin. About a quarter of an inch.
Hm, I thought, I just allowed fecal bacteria into my bloodstream. AWESOME. Then I threw up in my mouth, and ran into the bathroom and washed my hands about 13 times, periodically stopping to squeeze blood out of my finger in hopes it might carry small particles of poopwax out with it. Just foul. Horribly foul.
Then I had to clean the bottom of the toilet, which meant tipping it over; I tried to pour the remaining bowl-water into the tub, but most of it just went onto the floor and my bare feet (I’m not very smart). I cleaned that off, put the wax seal onto the drain, pushed the toilet atop it, mushed it into the wax, and put the new bolts on and tightened them down.
The nastiest part was that the room smelled like crap and wax for almost two weeks, even after scrubbing the bejeebers out of it with the harshest chemicals I could find in my house (mostly Miracle Gro and paint remover, I think).
“poopwax”