Goodbye Facebook, Hello Toilet
Well I’ve had it. With the latest revelations about Facebook’s involvement with Trump’s campaign, I find I can no longer support their business, and I certainly can’t trust them with my personal information. So I’m going to delete my Facebook account and revive my blog, and hopefully get in the habit of writing more.
With that introduction, one of the last reasons I hung on to using Facebook was to share the progress on our 1888 Victorian with friends and family. So my grand reopening post is going to be about pooping in the privacy of your own home. Yep, what better way to grab your attention.
Back in 2012, I started on remodeling our back bathroom. Since there’s only two of us living here, we mostly used the back bathroom as a big storage closet. We had finally decided to do something with it and started by adding a shower kit to the clawfoot tub. When we started using the bathroom though we found that the sink was clogged. I tried the usual solutions to no avail, and very reluctantly for this committed DIYer, I hid my pride, and called a plumber.
The plumber gave it his best, but even with a power snake he could not get through whatever was clogging the pipe. We could locate where the blockage was and it was in the wall behind the vanity. So that meant pulling the vanity out, opening the wall, and then cutting out and replacing that section of pipe. Whatever the clog was, it appeared to have cemented itself into a very solid form due to that lack of water going down the drain for years.
So as I sat there looking at the destroyed bathroom, I thought, well I want to redo this room sometime, might as well do it now. I proceeded to gut the room, and got it down to just a hole in the floor, ready to start on putting in tile.
Then the flood happened. In the winter of 2012 we experienced the worst flooding we’ve had. Fortunately it wasn’t bad enough to get into our house as it sits up about 3′ on the foundation. But it took out our heating system. We made the decision to move the furnace and ducts into the attic as the floods seemed to becoming more frequent and higher.
In order to get everything up into the attic we blew out the ceiling in the other bathroom since we wanted to raise it anyways. For some reason the bathroom was added to the house the ceiling was 8′ high, while the rest of the house has 10′ ceilings.
So now one bathroom had no ceiling, and the other bathroom had, well nothing. Sort of like our bank account after the emergency expense of all the work relocating the furnace.
The back bathroom sat in that mode for years as one financial emergency kept emptying our bank account. Our house was broken into, I had a bad motorcycle accident, a bad fall that ended up with more ER bills, a drunk driver plowing through our fence, etc.
So when I finally got my settlement from Eel River Disposal for the motorcycle accident, I decided to spend some of it putting the bedroom and back bathroom back together. I’ll post the story of the bedroom in a few days when the final touches to that room are finished.
About two months ago the toilet in our main bathroom started leaking, and as it’s a vintage high tank toilet, I didn’t want to tear into it as antique plumbing parts can be hard to source sometimes. So we limped along putting Tupperware under the leak to catch the water, which Darcy assumed was his personal water bowl. It was a race to see whether it would last until we at least got the toilet installed back in the back bathroom.
So that’s really the whole point of this post. How do you install a toilet back in after you’ve raised the floor 1/2″ due to the new tile? First attempt was an extra thick toilet wax seal. Didn’t even come close to making a seal. So I got on the internet so see what the solution was. I thought about stacking two gaskets, but it seemed kind of dicy as even one gasket will fail eventually. Sure enough I found references that suggested that solution. I also found just as many people saying don’t do that, and their arguments were very convincing, the most important aspect is that if the either of the gaskets leak, your leak now goes down into the subfloor since the flange is now below the finished floor.
Better to raise the flange and there were several options for that, but the best one I found was a kit from Oatey, called the Set-Rite Toilet Flange Extension Kit. I watched their installation video on YouTube, and then promptly ordered two online after I couldn’t find them locally. Delivery was scheduled for Friday, guests were arriving the next Tuesday. That gave me the weekend to get it installed.
Just as promised, the package showed up Friday, and Saturday morning first thing it was installed. The bolts for the extension matched the pattern for the flange so my first attempt failed as I was trying to drill through the existing screws. Much easier to remove the existing screws and then screwed everything down with the new longer screws.
With the kit installed, a normal sized wax gasket provided a good seal. A test flush showed that there was a small leak from where the line connects to the float valve, so I tightened that, maybe too much, because now the valve didn’t work at all. Off to Nielsen’s for a new valve, and we now have a working, reliable toilet in the house again!