Picture courtesy of Lowe’s….as was the replacemnt toiletApparently, I’m not the only one that has issues with home repairs. Invariably, something goes awry and I spend entirely too long trying to figure out how to keep things from completely falling apart.

Since Saturday was a beautiful day, I though it would be a good time to spend half the day inside trying to mess-up my house in the name of “home improvement”.

We have a toilet downstairs that features a continuous flush mechanism. That’s fancy speak for “it runs all the time.” Nothing better than hearing the toilet randomly flush in the middle of the night. But it has started to flush more and more frequently, so I took advantage of the visit from my in-laws and got to work.

Looks comfy, doesn't it?First, I had to pick a new toilet to put in. Apparently, there are 6,473 different styles of toilets. And the colors are insane. I needed an “off-white” to match the other decor in the bathroom. The available selections in this category were bone, alabaster, biscuit, cream, and pearl. WOW! There’s statistically no way for me to make the right choice here.

And then, my father-in-law pointed out something that I failed to notice….I get to pick the performance of this thing. For the environmentally sound, there’s the “efficient” models. However, most households in the south probably utilize the “standard” flush. So two engineers are standing in the aisle of Lowe’s trying to decide on which toilet to get…which do you think we got?

That’s right. We got a “high performance” model. There’s nothing better than feeling of 53 gallons of water surgie through a small bowl in less than 4 seconds. The walls in the house shake, the dishes rattle….yeah, it’s a good flusher.  The sticker on this thing in the store had a picture of a roll of toilet paper and a statement that read “flushes up to 150 feet.” There are a lot of jokes that I could put in this space, but I’m above that type of humor. (Actually, I’m having a hard time picking the best one. Got suggestions?)

But picking the potty was the easy part.  The hard part was putting it in.  2 trips to Lowes, a leaky valve, a low mounting flange, a washer that’s too large, the resulting trim-down with a dremel, 2 extra wax seals, and some left-over pieces later….we have a new toilet installed.  If give it a week before the whole thing falls through the floor.