Toiletgate

I have been considering writing about this for some time, and now, after counseling, I feel comfortable enough to do so.

“This,” of course, is our late upstairs toilet and the debacle surrounding it. If you read Momma Pug’s blog, you already know something about this. But you don’t know the full story. The complete story.

MY story.

It’s a Saturday night/Sunday morning, now 10 days or so ago. The missus and I come in from a night out and we’re talking in the bedroom. Sonny the Pug and I are in the middle of the room, while she’s sitting on the bed.

And I feel a drop of water hit me on the shoulder. Clearly, booze or not, my mind immediately starts screaming, “NOT GOOD.” One look at the ceiling and I could tell it was a whole lot worse than not good; in fact, it was pretty fucking bad. There was water damage about four feet long and a foot across, with at least one part of the ceiling looking like it was about to cave in.

I quickly ran upstairs and turned off the toilet, noticing that the floor was wetter than Ellen DeGeneres at a WNBA game. At this point, I figured we had a bigger problem than a leaking toilet and that a pipe between the upstairs floor and the downstairs ceiling had busted.

So, I did what any confused and worried individual would do at 1 in the morning – I called my dad. Shockingly, he didn’t have much to tell me, except that I’d probably better turn the water off to the house.

I’d sort of figured I’d have to do that, except there was one problem: I couldn’t figure out where to turn it off. So I was outside, in the middle of the night wearing this flash-light on a headband thing that makes you look like a highly fashionable miner, in my shorts and flip-flops (I’d changed since coming home), looking for this thing. I didn’t find it until morning, at which point, the water had stopped anyway.

So, the next morning, I pondered my options and came to a highly reasonable conclusion: I called my dad again.

“You need to find out what the problem is,” he said.

“How am I going to do that?” I asked, knowing he’d say that I have to punch a hole in the roof.

“Punch a hole in the roof and see what’s going on.”

Fuck.

At this point, Momma Pug has a brilliant thought: Madge and her husband (ok, her husband) have experience with stuff like this! Momma Pug “invites” them over for slave labor…ERR, a visit…and we get down to work. Madge’s husband, the Razorback, punches the hole in the ceiling and finds that the pipes are good, it’s the toilet that’s the problem.

Then, we go upstairs and find a bigger problem. After ripping out the shitty piece of carpet that had covered the bathroom floor (note: if you EVER see carpet on a floor where there’s water flowing frequently, that’s a danger sign), we see that the only thing between us and being Isaac Newton’s bitch is a ¾-inch piece of plywood.
Which is largely rotted from water damage. Oh shit oh dear.

Now, this reinforced a lesson that I had probably figured out about a year ago: pay attention to the caliber of people you buy your house from. Try buying your house from an upscale accountant, or some responsible member of the community. Odds are, you’ll find a house in excellent shape that’s worth your money. We bought ours from a couple who had gone bankrupt after buying a really big house in Katy before unloading this one, all while their business was going belly-up. Oh, and the guy considered himself a home improvement expert. Never buy from one of those, either. The unfucking of his “improvements” is probably going to take us a decade.

So, largely following the Razorback’s lead, the rest of Sunday is completely pissed away cutting holes in the floor, putting some two-by-fours, putting in new plywood and trying to install the toilet. This is, of course, after we deal with the most utterly fucking inept and customer unfriendly Home Depot in the world. Home Depot’s motto, allegedly, is, “You can do it. We can help.” The one for store 5796/Silverlake should be “You can do it. Ask us if we give a fuck.”

By 8 that night, have the ceiling is on our bedroom floor, there’s a nice hole in the roof which allows you to hear the upstairs TV and we’re trying to figure out exactly what a wax ring does for you.
No, you pervert, it is not a contraceptive.

At about this time, I’m outside getting new tile out of the back of the car when my dad pulls up. More on dad in a second. But the tile – did you think I was going to put down more fucking carpet? I say thee nay! The missus and I only settle for the finest, so we got some laminate tile flooring called “Eurotile” or something like that, so when the floor does collapse in a couple of years, the rubble will be really stylish. All the fashion people can go, “Oh, I’m sure that looked so fabulous with the yellow walls before everything fell through the ceiling!”

Anyway, dad arrives home and looks at me with a hopeful smile and gives me a thumbs-up. He take a look at the tired and frustrated look at my face and knows that not all is well even before I say, “Welcome to my nightmare.”

All he can do is say, “Well…I brought you a new microwave.”

I appreciate the gesture, honestly, but it doesn’t fix our bathroom – even though I would have considered nuking it at that point, because I knew it wasn’t going to get done that night. Why? Because, while screwing in the base of the toilet, I snapped a bolt. Home Depot number 5796 was already closed, so there was no getting a new bolt and superiorly shitty service that night.

By the time we got to night number two, I came to realize that it really didn’t matter if I had the bolt or not, as I’d pretty much fucked up the toilet installation process in every other possible way. How did we determine this? When dad and I completely assembled said toilet (which, by the way, we got for a nice low price of $79, proving that you do get what you pay for) and I went downstairs for a test flushing.

Did pulled down on the lever and the toilet leaked from virtually every possible orifice, soaking my head and shirt.

“LEAK! LEAK! LEAK!” I screamed, as if it was going to do any good. I trudged back upstairs, soaking wet, waiting for Momma Pug’s giggling. Thankfully, she was too engrossed in “Arrested Development” to notice.

“Hey, did you say something?” My dad asked me.

“No, nothing at all,” I said, dripping on the plywood “floor.”

On to day three. We determined that one of our biggest problems was the hose between the wall faucet and the toilet tank, as it leaked like the State Department. So we decided to tell Home Depot Number 5796 to go outside and play hide and go fuck itself and went to Lowe’s, some seven miles out of the way. We get there and find that there are about 48 different types of hoses that you can install on your toilet, but not only does only one work, Lowe’s has horrible descriptions! Did you know there are hoses with OD connectors? I would have thought that would have been Amy Winehouse’s nickname for her heroin needle, but no. Ours was supposed to have a half-inch “fine” connector.
Yeah, well, guess what we couldn’t find? Fine. So we picked up something that was close, and close did not fit. Square peg, round hole, pissedoffed-ness.

On the other hand, I did find out what a wax ring was for. It goes between the floor and the toilet’s bottom to prevent leakage. The first one we put down sucked worse than a Texas Tech student’s SAT scores, and the second one got messed up when we mistakenly moved the toilet. But the THIRD one worked!

Day 4. Back to Home Depot Number 5796, where, lo and behold, we find the right type of hose! And by “we,” I mean “me,” because once again, you couldn’t get help in this place if you were on fire. After all, half the staff, if you could find an employee, probably couldn’t find the water hose section (it’s in gardening, outside. I know this now). Bring it home, install.

Leak.

Irony of ironies, the leak was coming through from the tank of the toilet, which is where the previous toilet and been leaking from (for probably about 15 years). At this point, my desire to kill the previous “improvement genius” has reached a point where, if you put him next to Ayman al-Zawahiri and told me I had one shot, I’d go looking for the magic bullet to kill both of them. But, unlike the previous idiot, we figured out what the problem was. Of course, we couldn’t do anything about it until the next day.

Day 5. Home Depot 5796. We buy a couple of new washers for the toilet (which we would have done with the old one, had Mr. Improvement Genius not caulked everything up, which didn’t seal anything but made it impossible to stop the leak) and go home.
Success! Our new toilet not only works, but does not leak! At this point, I pick up the old toilet, which had been sitting upside down in the bathtub. I took it out to the curb and, as I prepared to lift it over my head and spike it, I feel old toilet water leaking out of it.

Screw it. I spiked it anyway and it shattered into a million pieces. I’d like to see that son of a bitch leak now.