The Bathroom Saga

By: Stephanie on 10:32 AM

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It's been over a month since our toilets went out. I won't tell you where we've been eliminating waste, because you'll only be grossed out and it's not very exciting anyway. What I will tell you is that we have tried to solve the problem.

The issue with solving the problem, of course, is that we don't know exactly what the problem is. Neither Johnny nor I are plumbers. Despite my high school shop teacher's best efforts, I don't know a damn thing about pipes or plumbing. (Sorry, Mr. Peery.) Johnny and I, however, do know how to use the internet. In some reading or another, Johnny came to the conclusion that we should just replace the hall bathroom's toilet. He ordered a super-efficient Kohler from Amazon. It arrived, and we stared at the boxes for a week, daunted by the task ahead.

Last Saturday we finally opened the boxes, ready to get to work. After all, we'd watched Home Depot's helpful video on replacing a toilet. That guy got it accomplished in 3 minutes! Surely it wouldn't take us more than an hour!

We opened the giant Kohler box and were greeted by a small piece of porcelain. Uh-oh. Maybe it's from an unimportant part of the toilet,I thought. As we opened the rest of the box, this is what we saw:

That isn't good.

Our new toilet was rendered unusable! Johnny fired off an email to the seller, and we ventured to Home Depot in Owasso, OK to pick up another toilet. Home Depot was a soothing experience, full of wide aisles and helpful employees and best of all, an identical Kohler toilet-to-go kit that was about $100 cheaper than what we'd gotten online.

Back at home, Johnny got to work sponging water out of our old toilet. I kept Buttons occupied; she was determined to help Johnny by drinking as much toilet water as possible.

Everyone was hard at work.

Johnny managed to remove the tank, and the future looked bright. 

It's a cakewalk after this!

Wrong again! As Johnny attempted to remove the bolts from the toilet's base, the rusty old things disintegrated. It was impossible to keep a wrench on them. So off to Ace Hardware we went. We purchased a small hacksaw. Johnny sawed through one bolt and we called it a night.

Yesterday evening, we got back to work on the toilet. Johnny sawed through the other bolt. Surely the hard part must be done. Both bolts were sawed through, and according to Home Depot Video Man, we just had to pop the old toilet off, replace the wax ring, and put on the new toilet. Right? Right? 

Wrong. You see, when the former owners of this house remodeled this bathroom, they grouted the toilet to the floor. No, really. Upon Johnny's mother's suggested, we tried hot water to help soften the grout. This wasn't really moving things along at the pace we'd like, so we again put down our damp sponge and fell back, defeated by our house's previous idiot owners. 

The current plan is to talk with people at Home Depot about the fastest way to dissolve the grout. Is there a chemical available? Should we just start chiseling?

On the bright (?) side, this will probably mean we will go ahead and give the bathroom a makeover, complete with new tile, paint, and a lighting. There are worse ways to spend a summer, I suppose.