When we purchased our house we didn’t really pay attention to the toilets, because, well, who does that? After moving in we found that only the basement toilet was full size, so our master bathroom toilet, and guest bathroom toilet upstairs were very, very small for K, and uncomfortable. As it was just a matter of comfort we put replacing them off.
I swear, not even a month after moving in the toilets that were just uncomfortable ended up being so much more, broken, not flushing, continuing to drain water when you flushed and not stopping, leaking from the pipes that connected at the wall, etc.
Suddenly, these toilets were a nightmare. We still put off replacing them for a year and a half, with K or my dad jimmy rigging them to work, to flush, to fill, to not continually run water, every few months. And, with K learning to replace the pipes that connect at the wall that were leaking, both on the toilets and under the bathroom sinks. We actually only took the plunge to replace them when my mom texted me with a photo of these toilets that Costco had, that my dad said were good, and that were also such a good price, around $80/toilet!
I kind of feel like this house is just one massive project we need to redo. The previous owners seem to have not taken care of things very well, or to have attempted to be DIY-ers, and done a really, really bad job at it. We had to have an electrician come out a few months ago and fix some lights downstairs, and apparently the basement has had the electrical done the DIY way. The bathroom light wouldn’t work unless you also had the laundry room light on too, as it had been wired horribly.
I cringe thinking of what else we haven’t found that will need fixing, but am so thankful for how handy K, his dad, and my dad are, and how willing they are to help. We ended up having to call K’s dad for help replacing our master bathroom toilet – the flange was cracked, and google said to replace a flange we either had to tear apart the ceiling below to get to it, or rip out the sub flooring, as flange’s are cemented in.
That sounded less than appealing, and K’s dad, thankfully, had a much easier solution that we had never heard of! You can get a cover for a flange, it’s metal, and it lines up with the holes in the flange for the screws, and if you can get that to fit right you don’t have to replace the whole flange. This was a huge relief, and after quite a bit of humming and hawing K was able to get it to fit.
We didn’t have any of those issues when replacing the guest bathroom toilet, which we thankfully did first, or it would have seemed pretty discouraging. That one took K maybe an hour to an hour and a half total, then our master bathroom one took around four hours. It was insane, pretty much whatever could go wrong on that one did, but K got it all to work, and did such a great job!
These new toilets are a bit narrower, so you can see where the previous owners painted around the toilet bowl – we’ll definitely be fixing that as we paint the bathrooms, but we just haven’t gotten to that quite yet.
As soon as the toilets were in K was so excited, sitting on them with this huge grin. Not only were they normal size, so he could actually fit, they were a bit taller, which was a pleasant surprise! With them being a bit narrower too there is more room on the sides, so you can actually use the bathroom garbage cans, and such.
Midst all of the toilet replacing A became obsessed with her tongue, for the first time, so that was a huge distraction. She kept sticking it out, slobbering everywhere, and if we stuck ours out she’d try to stick hers out. Pretty much the cutest thing ever. I know I say that all the time about her, but, I think it’s obvious by now that she is the cutest thing ever, haha. A tends to freeze up if you get out the camera, just starring blankly, so it was pretty lucky that we were able to get some shots of her in action.
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