Toilet trauma

Who’da thunk? I was imagining a person knocking on the front door asking what all the noise was. It sounded like a machine gun going on and on for hours. The answer would be “Oh, we’re installing a new toilet.” It seems toilets have changed a bit since 1976 when the one we were replacing was installed. It was one of the old ones that used so much water for each flush that we would have to have our pump going constantly if there were more than two people in the house at a time. Plus, it really didn’t work very well, backing up and all that unpleasant stuff. So last summer I bought a nice new one-piece low-water-consumption Kohler beauty that was on sale. I know, I know…I’m a sucker for cheap toilets. I stored it in our wood shed, waiting for the golden moment when we would install it.

Luke decided that our old “unfunctionable*” toilet was not good for Hilary’s needs. It seems pregnant women (Hilary) have to pee about every ten minutes and going clear over to the other bathroom was not a good option. So Karla cleared out the cardboard heap we have in the wood shed (we recycle cardboard) to reveal the bargain-priced toilet. Luke hauled it to the bathroom, and we tore out the old toilet. Seems the new one didn’t even come close to fitting the old space unless the wall (made of the hardest rock known to man) was chipped away a bit. We started with a cold chisel and hammer. That would take forever, so we graduated to a star drill and hammer. No luck. So I hauled out the rotary hammer drill (pictured) and finally some progress was made. After two hours of Luke’s beating on the rock wall, about two inches was removed and the toilet finally fit! The house is literally smothered in rock dust since when you do something incrementally you don’t think of the consequences since it started with such low-tech hammer-and-chisel stuff we didn’t close all the doors to confine the dust. So add another ten or more hours of house cleaning to the job of installing a toilet!

In a normal house, this would have been a twenty-minute job. So much for the rustic charm of rock-and-log houses!

*Unfunctionable was a favorite word used by a friend of ours. He once taught his dog to say Woof instead of Arf. A very talented man. He also liked to say “irregardless.”