I'm A Potty Fixer!!!

Ever heard of water torture? If you are a light sleeper, like myself, then water torture is hearing the toilet in your bedroom gurgle and make sputtering noises every night while you try to sleep for months and months and months.

Our house is about 20 years old. New enough that we still live in a nice neighborhood and not everything is completely outdated, but old enough that everything is starting to break down and needs to be replaced. Being the proud owner of a home = responsibility and hand over the $$$.

Our toilet has needed help for quite some time. After both Chris and I attempted to fix the problem with a little wiggle and jiggle here and there of various potty parts we finally called for help. Chris had a friend, who is a professional plumber, come to the house to solve the problem. 45 dollars later he had replaced the screws and attached some kind of floaty device to the chain. The water still ran, but he said to just play around with the bulb until it settled down. Um, I might be kind of stupid here, but isn't that what we paid you for?! I guess you get what you pay for (he did give us a 50% discount - seeing as we were friends and all that.)

After much more wiggling and jiggling, the water still ran it's course taking my sanity with it. Knowing that Chris would not approve of paying for another plumber to come I decided to take matters into my own hands. I drove all the way down to Home Depot and purchased a complete toilet repair kit.

Since no amount of adjustment to the old parts seemed to work I decided to rip out all the old and replace it all with new potty parts.

So I spent most of my Saturday rummaging through the garage in search of tools that would fit and work (the instructions assured me that all I would need were one pair of pliers and one wrench - ha, ha, ha!). Several hours later I had a toilet with a new flush valve, fill valve, gasket, flapper, and tank lever.

When everything was once again assembled I was so proud of myself (and also forgave myself of any unwomanly words I might have uttered during the process). I called to my husband to show off my handy work only to notice that my toilet was now leaking in two different spots. Water was dripping onto the floor. And like any composed woman who has used up her whole day on a stinky project I created some new words and had a nice tantrum.

I once again turned off the water valve and emptied the toilet of water. I put a towel down on the floor and waited until I cooled off to fix the problems.

Well, two days later I finally got back to my project. Now that I had the right tools and knew what to do I had that tank off and tightened up all the leaking parts and reassembled it all in less than 30 minutes. Wahoo. And this time - no more leaking!!!!!

I am now in Heaven. The night is still and quiet - not a drop or drip to be heard. And if I need to get up in the middle of the night I no longer have to stumble down the stairs in the dark into the other bathroom.

If any of you are having problems - call me over - I'm free! And by the way, just call me Josephine (Jo for short) the plumber. Thank you.