Water Water Everywhere
[originally posted October 8, 2007]
For those of you who have stayed over at our new house, rejoice, rejoice we have fixed the leaky toilet. We ordered two new toilets online from toiletwarehouse.com We got the Toto Drake which was reviewed in this pretty interesting study. The study’s pretty cool, and you should read it. It’s pretty interesting. I’ve already “christened” the toilet and it’s a pretty nice toilet. It takes a little getting used to since it uses so little water. But of course there is more to this story than just the new toilet, thus the title 
So we were originally going to have a plumber come in to install the toilets. I called a few places and they all said that it would cost around $150 to $200 per toilet. While I guess that doesn’t sound like so much, but we just bought a guest bed, some drapes and these toilets, so it kindof adds up. I wasn’t so worried about the toilet itself, but changing the water supply line, since a little mistake could mean quite a mess.
So we started with the guest bathroom. We have had the water supply turned off for awhile since the water supply was leaking quite a bit. I had to saw off the bolts holding the toilet down since they were rusted on. I think these have been in since the house was built. I finally got the toilet out and carefully pulled it out and stuffed a rag into the hole. It is nasty down there. The wax ring came up easy and we went ahead with cleaning everything up. Sarah then kindly painted the bathroom, this periwinkle blue, which I picked out. Unfortunately our existing tile is yellow, so there’s kind of a strange clash going on.
So now here is the hard part. What do I do about this supply line? Well I shut off the water and took off line and we head out to home depot. Ughhhhh, there is nothing designed to fit the existing valve we have. So the only choice is to take the whole valve off. We run back home to check what type of pipe we have. Turns out we have a half inch hard copper pipe. Great! That means we can use a simple compression fitting instead of having to solder. So I bought the right fitting and went home.
I thread the on the compression fitting, give it a quarter turn with my wrenches. I asked Sarah to turn on the water. She mentioned to me that she has no idea where the valve was. Well that’s no good. It’s important that every homeowner knows where there water shut off valve is. You never know when you might need to find it. We saunter down to the basement and find the valve. I turn it all the way over and you hear the wonderful woosh of water flowing into the pipe. As we walk upstairs I hear water running and think, “I must have left the tub on when I depressurized the water. I get to the top of the stairs and it dawns on me, “OH NO!!! That’s the supply line.” I turn around and tell Sarah to run and turn off the water, and I continue on to the bathroom. There is a beautiful jet of water coming out of the copper tube, and I see my nice compression fitting sitting on the floor. I think when I made the quarter turn, I turned it the wrong way and actually loosened the fitting instead of securing it. So now we have a couple of gallons of water on the floor going everywhere.
Some of it gets out onto the carpet, and we have a wonderful mess to clean up. Sarah sees it dripping into the kitchen and hears it going through our walls. It actually ends up in the basement storage room eventually and we’ve had to peel up the vinyl laminate floor that we put down too. So now there are some nasty water stains in the kitchen, and a pretty wet basement. We’ve dried up the best that we can, and the dehumidifier is running non stop. We hope we get everything dried up soon.
Despite all this we did get our two toilets installed. Saved a few hundred dollars, which we will now put towards putting down new tiles and fixing the ceiling. But all in all a good experience. We can look back and laugh at our little accident, but hopefully this never happens again. Well stop on by and check out our new toilets. Feel free to have a big meal before hand if you need to be convinced of its flushing power