Pleasant plumbing

What a headline! Certainly I never thought I would ever see those two words so close together, much less making up the entire phrase! One of the toilets in the house needed some attention, and when I touched part of the plastic that makes up the mechanism pictured here, it shattered! By simply being touched! Time to be replaced.

(I just noticed that of the five preceding sentences, four of them end with an exclamation point. That’s a first, I think, for me anyway.)





The smaller picture shows the date the toilet was manufactured (at least when the clay tank was ready to go into the kiln). Thirty-one years is pretty good for plumbing parts to endure daily use. By now, most replacement toilet innards are the Fluidmaster brand, which claims to be the #1 selling fill valve in the world. It has a one-year warranty, though. Not thirty-one. Well, I can always hope.

Back to the subject at hand, this job was actually pleasant. I turned off the water to the house to preclude any flooding since the hose connecting the toilet to the water line didn’t have a shut-off valve installed. Hm-m-m. What other surprises are in store? None, it turned out. I used a couple of locking pliers (there wasn’t room for the normal pipe wrenches) and removed all the old stuff. The new “angle stop” valve went on without a hitch. The new feed hose, stainless steel wrapped this time, went on without a hitch or even tools. The new fill valve went in slick as a whistle and was just hand-tightened—no tools. I adjusted the fill level, turned on the water and the tank filled to the exact level it’s supposed to.

Total time: About 30 minutes. I was not bruised or bleeding. I hadn’t uttered one bad word. My blood pressure remained at its usual docile unperturbed level. The room wasn’t a mess. I even had some parts left over, which I’m sure I will save somewhere and after a decade or two will still be saved somewhere, never to be used. All in all, a memorable experience. Strange, though. Tomorrow I’ll probably have a tree fall on me just to keep things even.