Toilet Heck
I hate toilets. Ok, maybe I don’t hate toilets. But I hate home improvement projects that involve toilets. Toilets are dirty. Particularly the bottoms of toilets. So I just have to rant.
Toilet Incident #1
About 2 months ago, our first floor toilet stopped working. We plunged and plunged but to no avail. The water just wouldn’t go down for hours. I thought for sure the kids dropped a toy in the toilet. I reluctantly pulled it. I took it outside on a little dolly, put on two layers of latex gloves…and found… DENTAL FLOSS! A whole box of dirty dental floss was stuck just near the exit pipe. And when I say dirty, you know what I mean. YUCK! Apparently someone accidentally knocked it off the back of the toilet. So, I ran to Depot and bought one of these fancy new non-wax toilet bowl gaskets to re-seat the toilet. It didn’t work. The toilet sits so close to the plumbing that it didn’t fit. (The toilet sort of “hovered”) I ran back to Depot and got the traditional NoSeep #10 wax ring. That has worked since. That toilet is fine now, and has returned to my good graces.
Toilet Incident #2
So, 4 weeks ago, BOTH of the upstairs toilet wouldn’t drain. No amount of plunging helped, so I figured it must be in the pipe passed the toilets. Ugh. So I decided I should rent an electric snake from home depot (by the way, these are the nastiest tools on the planet–just think where they’ve been). I pulled the toilet in our second bathroom, ran the snake through (it found a big clog), took the snake back to Depot, and re-set the toilet, this time using a “bol wax” ring. Everything was fine….
Toilet Incident #3
…Until water started dripping through the kitchen ceiling the next day. Turns out I hadn’t tightened the water intake valve sufficiently and a slow drip leak formed. Over the next 24 hours, that leak found its way through the drywall into the kitchen! Kim poked a hole through the ceiling drywall and a stream of water came gushing in. Fixing the slow leak was fairly easy (plumbers tape did the trick). But now the drywall in the kitchen is sagging. At least the water in the ceiling was from the clean side of plumbing.
Toilet Incident #4
Of course, why stop with only clean water? About a week ago the drip started happening again. This time, it was harder to track down. Turns out the cheap-o $1.98 “bol wax” ring I got at Home Depot failed, and water was essentially pouring out of the ring onto the wood floor, and again finding its way down into the kitchen. I’m finally going to get a chance to fix this tonight.
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January 27th, 2009 11:06 am
I have a toilet tank problem. The tank fills up with water but the object that floats up to stop the water from continuing to fill the bowl doesn’t do it’s job and so the water keeps running. My little girl and I have gotten so use to waiting for the bowl to fill and then stopping it ourselves. Also the handle to flush the toilet came up missing after a slumber party. Do you think that the weight of the handle maybe causing the problem? I know there has got to be a very simple fix it answer. Please give any advice you can muster after that horrible plumbing problem you had – I felt so terrible for you while reading it.