Apparently I needed to unbolt the toilet from the floor, after having drained all the water out of it Then, pick it up off of the hole in the ground and set it to the side, use a putty knife to scrape the old wax seal off and then put the new one on. Afterwards, I put the toilet back, sit on it to help it "settle onto the seal" and then screw the bolts back on. But not one at a time, a few turns for each so that they go on evenly. And not too tight because then I will crack the porcelain.
Yeah, so if you are like me then you are thinking "I always wondered why there are little bolt thingys on the sides of the toilet!" and the rest just sort of looks a lot like rocket science and rocket science is hard.
Really though, I thought it would suck but not as bad as the time with the belt for the washing machine that I swear was made some time in the mid seventies. It was avocado, weren't the seventies the only decade that GE did that color?
So, I went to Home Depot today and bought the seal, the putty knife thing and some pliers to get the bolt thingy off. Did you know that pliers can be like thirty bucks? Un-fucking-real.
Since tonight is pizza night which means I don't really have to cook and there aren't any dishes to wash, I figured I would fix the toilet before it got dark.
I changed into some shorts and an old t-shirt and put my hair up. Then I got a couple of towels because I have learned that it is inevitable that the floor will get wet if you are fixing anything even remotely near pipes. I grabbed my ipod and plugged it into some speakers and then took the lid off of the back of the toilet.
Now, who was it that decided that the thing that goes on the back of the toilet should be called a lid? It shouldn't. How confusing is it to have two things on the toilet called lids? So, after I took the lid off, I made my big mistake. I leaned the giant rectangular piece of porcelain up against the cabinet. Then, I turned the water off and flushed the toilet. This did drain all of the water from the tank but none of the water from the bowl. So, I flushed it again... and then again... but nothing was happening. The water in the bowl was just sitting there.
Insert here the phone call to Jiffinner to ask Boss if there was some special trick to getting the water out of the bowl. This is where Boss laughs and says that I can use a giant straw. This is where Kate has to put her hands into the water in the toilet bowl. All I could think about the whole time was how when I learned about natural disasters in school, they said you could drink the water from the tank of the toilet because it was still clean.
Once I had as much water out of the bowl as I was getting sans straw, I plopped my ass down on the floor and started to unscrew the bolt thingys.
You know, every time I say "bolt thingys", a master certified plumper somewhere dies right?
The thing about my toilet though is that the bolt thingys have apparently not been unscrewed since their installation which I am guessing from the level of rust and decay and difficulty of removal to be sometime around when Washington was president.
I started with the bolt thingy on the right side of the toilet and it literally started to fall apart when I tried to unscrew it. I took this as a sign that maybe I should concentrate on the left bolt thingy. After a couple of good turns, it started to move. At this point I am totally telling myself how much ass I kick and how this is a breeze and man I rock but then I notice that while the bolt is indeed turning, so is the screw thingy it is attached to. Now, while I am no rocket scientist, I am pretty sure that in order for the bolt thingy to come off of the screw thingy one of them has to hold still while the other moves.
Insert second pair of pliers here.
For a moment, just one, it seemed ingenious to hold the screw thingy with one set of pliers while using the other set to unscrew the bolt thingy. That did not last long as it became almost immediately evident that the bolt thingy and the screw thingy had fallen madly in love and morphed into one rusty piece of metal, never to be separated.
I sat back, feelings of defeat washing over me as I stared at these metal pieces of evil and considered my options. I could get on the phone and start calling husbands to see if there was some magical way to separate the molded metal pieces. I briefly thought of pouring some Coke on there since that eats away gross stuff on your battery cables. But, when I stood up to get my phone, I bumped the cabinet. And in bumping the cabinet, I caused the giant lid the slide down onto the floor and bust into approximately 17 pieces. Which is too many for gorilla glue.
So, now not only had I not fixed anything, but I broke something.
Stomping my foot in protest, I did what I probably should have done in the first place. I went and found the paper with the emergency phone numbers on it and called the number my landlord had left.
Someone will be here tomorrow to fix it.
Not the lid, no that can't be fixed. And I am told it is unlikely that Home Depot will just sell me a new one. Apparently, if you break the lid, you can just go buy a new toilet. Considering how easily they break, it seems to me like there would be some place that sold buttloads of them.
I considered taking pictures of all of this. The rusty gross bolt thingys, the broken lid, the tools but I was too pissed off.
Instead, here is a the picture I took at Home Depot of the directions for putting the wax seal on.
click it to make it bigger
Number of Master Certified Plumbers killed by this post: 13
(which is creepy since it is Friday the 13th)
So, in conclusion, I fought the John and the John won.
