If you watch TV for any amount of time you’ve seen the commercials where a Happy Couple visits Home Depot or Lowe’s or gets some Behr paint and then goes home and paints a room or adds a deck to their house or a builds a fully-functioning roller coaster in their backyard and then look at each other with pride and immediately start planning their next project. Because according to the assholes who put these ads on TV, we should never ever be satisfied with our homes because home improvement is incredibly simple and easy and we should get started immediately.
These ads are bullshit and I now have proof.
One Toilet Seat, Two Bolts—Easy Peasy
Uncharacteristically, I recently offered to run an errand, but I’m told the errand is unnecessary—we already have what I offered to go get—but I’m then told since I clearly have some time on my hands, why don’t I go get a new toilet seat for the upstairs toilet.
As Oscar Wilde said when he offered to run down to the corner opium den and pick up some party favors, but somehow wound up digging an Olympic-sized swimming pool instead:
“No good deed goes unpunished.”
Time Out for Quotes
According to the increasingly-inconvenient internet, Oscar Wilde wasn’t the first one to say this and even though she got credit, neither was Clare Boothe Luce.
(Geez, she doesn’t really look like a woman with a Luce Boothe, does she?)
Apparently, it was first said by “courtier” Walter Map and up until this moment I didn’t know “courtier” was a job occupation you could put on a business card, but it does sound a lot better than Royal Ass-Kisser. (Times change and those people are now identified with the label: “Trump Supporter.”)
And turns out, maybe Walter wasn’t the first one to say it either and maybe it was actually Marie Belloc Lowndes or James Agate or Leo Pavia or Mick Jagger because once someone says something clever, people start repeating it and claiming they thought of it, so if you ever hear someone say “Fuck Bob Vila” after his hitting his thumb with a hammer, now you know who said it first.
And Now Back to Our Cracked Toilet Seat
OK, so I’m the one who uses the upstairs toilet the most and also the one who maybe—and let’s emphasize “maybe”—cracked the seat that needs replacing, so shouldn’t I be the one to go get a new one and pay for it and install it, but if the upstairs toilet is my area of responsibility, how come someone else gets decide to decide it’s time for a new toilet seat?
I for one am willing to continue working with a cracked toilet seat and whatever happened to:
“Waste not, want not” or in this case, “Close enough for government work”?
(Clearly I couldn’t think of a good saying that justifies my continued laziness when it comes to home repair and this is the weakest part of my argument, so I believe we should move on immediately.)
Running out of good excuses, I go to the local hardware store and buy a toilet seat that says “FITS ALL TOILETS.”
So I see that and immediately stop reading and miss the part where it says “ELONGATED” and not “ROUND” and buy the wrong toilet seat because even though I’ve used that ROUND toilet for about four decades, I never spent one split-second thinking about what shape it was, but I have a really good excuse:
I’M CREATIVE.
Which as I’ve explained before, means I’m paying no attention to the shit you want me to think about because I’m too busy coming up with sophomoric puns that can be turned into sophomoric cartoons and that’s what pays the bills and I have yet to earn one thin dime thinking about the shape of my toilet.
Also…
If some toilets are ELONGATED and some are ROUND, then it’s false advertising to say: “FITS ALL TOILETS” and the toilet-seat makers will be hearing from my lawyers as soon as I get some lawyers which means the toilet-seat makers have nothing to worry about because it took me several years to replace a cracked toilet seat and I don’t see me looking up Perry Mason or Ben Matlock in the near future.
Plus—as I understand it—they’re both dead.
Anyway…
I get home with my ELONGATED toilet seat only to find I have a ROUND toilet and now it’s back to the hardware store to exchange toilet seats and confirm the low opinion the clerk already had of a customer who originally looked for a toilet seat in the Lumber Department.
Have I mentioned I’m CREATIVE?
And Now to Commence the Toilet Seat Removal
So the first bolt comes out easily, although the bolt is really really really long like they expected the toilet to be part of the Space Shuttle and didn’t want it rattling apart on re-entry which maybe was good thinking because if I was re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere at 17,500 MPH (got that off the internet) in a craft put together with Super Glue and built by the same government employees who already blew up two of them, I’d definitely be shitting my pants and wearing a five-point harness to keep me attached to that Space Shuttle toilet.
BTW:
Changing toilet seats is a disgusting job and I won’t go into details, but you don’t want to spend too much time thinking about the composition of the goo that collects under a toilet seat bolt over four decades and the less said about this the better, even though I’m about to say more about it.
I believe touching that goo is what turned janitor Melvin Jerko (wait…it’s actually Melvin Junko) into the Toxic Avenger when someone asked him to change a toilet seat and let’s face it, Melvin had lots to Avenge.
Moving On to Bolt 2
So Bolt 1 comes out easily and I remove the seat to get at Bolt 2 and I’m thinking the job’s half-done, but the geniuses who built this house put the upstairs toilet about four inches away from the upstairs bath tub, so I can’t really see Bolt 2 or get a good grip on it. And even if I get the crescent wrench in the right spot (using the Ray Charles Method of Toilet Seat Bolt Removal) I can move the wrench about three inches before I hit the side of the bathtub, which sounds like a pain in the ass, only because it was.
But wait, as usual, it gets worse.
The people who built the cracked toilet seat decided the bolt should be metal and the nut that holds the bolt in place should be plastic and after a few misguided attempts to twist the plastic nut, the edges get all mooshy and now I can’t get a good grip on the plastic nut.
And…
The metal bolt’s top is perfectly round—no way to get a grip on it either—and it’s also recessed into a plastic bracket, so my next move is to go get my Leatherman Tool with all those gadgets and use the needle-nosed pliers to hold the top bracket still while I crank on the plastic nut I can’t even see and almost immediately my Leatherman tool gets knocked into the toilet.
Twice.
I don’t know how “toilet water” got such a good reputation because I got two face-fulls and didn’t smell one bit better.
The above picture was on Wikipedia, but the label was misspelled—“Eau de toilette”—when they clearly meant “Oh de toilet!” (See? This is the kind of high-quality joke I’m thinking of while the rest of you non-CREATIVE types are noticing that your toilet’s ROUND and not ELONGATED.)
So next I’m thinking maybe I should just cut through the bolt and go look for my non-existent hacksaw. After conducting a half-assed search, I find no hacksaw handle, but do find hacksaw blades.
Which seems like buying a gallon of milk without getting a container to put it in, but I’m not going to let this stop me because I’ve seen all those movies where prisoners use a nail file to cut through thick prison bars, but neglect to realize they could accomplish that Cell-Improvement Job because they had a Life Sentence and nothing better to do and didn’t have my highly-pressurized time frame, which means a Royals game was about to be on TV.
Nevertheless…
I decide that’s the way to go, but realize I’ve got “artist’s hands” which is nice way of saying Marie Antoinette had more calluses than someone who holds pencils for a living. I go down to the basement and rummage through my baseball equipment to find a batting glove to hold the hacksaw blade and after 20 minutes of ineffective hacksawing, can’t see any discernable effect on that fucking bolt.
Next Up: Family Members Get Involved
Now I’m thinking maybe if someone held the bottom nut still and I cranked the bolt from the top we might get somewhere, but first you have to listen to the person you recruit suggest all the things you’ve already tried for the last 90 minutes, because they don’t want to touch that disgusting bolt and nut and turn into a Toxic Avenger either.
Finally, a family member is holding the plastic nut with pliers while I use my toilet-water soaked Leatherman tool to twist the metal bolt maybe 1/16th of an inch at a time and as previously discussed the metal bolt is longer than Moby Dick. (The book, not the whale—but come to think of it, either example would work.)
Eeeeeeeeeeeeventually…
The bolt is freed and I put the new toilet seat on which will be replaced by some Future Generation because I’m done fucking around with toilet seats.
I need to get started on that backyard roller coaster.
Stuff like this is why I love reading you. OMG
I used to be able to do almost all of the repairs myself. I loved painting the house. Years ago, I was in the local Sherwin-Williams having to replace what (at the time) was a $20 paintbrush because my husband used it on his truck when he was changing the brake pads. The guys at the store were laughing at the idiocy. I had packs of cheap brushes that he could have used, but nope. He used my favorite angled brush. Never skimp on your tools. Bristles falling out while painting trim, thereby making more work means the price is worth it. Those cheap brushes were never meant for painting, despite the name. They were good for cleaning corners though...and brake dust.
As to toilets specific. Um... That is literally the easiest thing to do, so the images in my head of you were even funnier. Doing the bloody flapper is a pain. I always took the seats off to clean the toilets fully. I would throw them in the tub covered in cleaner. I am a bit of a germaphobe, so things had to be CLEAN. Again, health issues preclude me from doing most of it anymore. The toilet seat I have in my bathroom is pretty neat. The bolts stay attached to the toilet, but the seat itself has clips that lock it to the bolts. It makes cleaning so much easier. I learned a long time ago to retighten the bolts of all the toilets.
I am so glad to live in a housing cooperative with a maintenance staff 😂 I do have to buy the seat but they'd replace it for me as part of my stockholder agreement.