Alan D. Miller
Household toilets were trained over the past year.
We didn’t use any workplace facilities, and all that hoarded toilet paper had to go somewhere, right? Flush handles, seats up and down and up and down. Finally, after all of that, in some cases it was time to go to the old bathroom.
In our house, this toilet was 76 years old. We know this because the date was stamped on the tank. It was part of an extension to our 1940s house, the core of which was built in 1870 – when the original toilet was in a backyard shed.
My bride never liked the old throne, but when we remodeled the kitchen / family room area of our house 15 years ago we kept the old toilet because it worked, matched the character of the house, and we were able to save a few hundred valuable dollars through reuse.
To be honest, the old china dresser was still working just fine. It used a lot of water, however, which is wasteful and was a big reason my conservation-minded bride wanted it gone. (I’ve been thinking more about how our water bill went up with all that flushing during the pandemic – and we should have done that a year ago.)
When I got the first week of vacation in over a year, I spent it catching up on a long list of things I hadn’t done at work from home during the pandemic.
That’s ironic, isn’t it? I worked from home. I saw all of these things several times a day – the toilet that needed changing, the closet doors that didn’t close properly, the bike tire that flattened last fall, the back porch that needed cleaning, this one and the other that had to be fixed.
However, working from home made it easier to work longer hours. After three seconds of driving from the kitchen to the anteroom, I spent driving time on the computer. Right in the evening. And every time I shuttled into the kitchen for coffee for three seconds, I saw all the things that hadn’t been done:
Confirm! The gas fireplace indicator light must be cleaned! The smoke alarms need new batteries! The lamp near my desk – the lamp I turn on at 6 a.m. every morning – needs a new switch!
The stress of seeing all the things that needed attention – and seeing them all day every day – was overwhelming. So I took a week off in March because I knew I had nowhere to go because I just got my first vaccination that week so I could turn off as many things on this to-do list as possible.
The first thing on the list was this toilet. My bride and I went to the hardware store, bought the toilet of her dreams along with a new water supply pipe and a wax ring to seal the toilet against the waste pipe, and while she was at work that morning I got it all ready. I did a number of other chores until she got home because I wanted an audience for the plumbing job.
Actually, I just wanted someone to schedule me.
It wasn’t my first toilet rodeo and I was feeling a little cocky so I asked her to reset her clock when I started opening the old dresser.
Twenty minutes later we had a new low flow toilet and were ready to go.
Alan D. Miller is a dispatch editor who writes on old house repair and historical preservation.
@ Your House
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