A Tale of Three Toilets

This is one of those blog posts that will most likely make you laugh. You will laugh because you are thrilled these are problems that I am experiencing, and not you.

The problems I describe here occurred over the course of four weekends and involved three (and a half) toilets. I’ll start off with the toilet in the bathroom at the top floor of the lake. 

David discovered water around the base of that toilet one weekend. He had mentioned that the toilet was crooked, which it was, but I noticed it could be easily moved from crooked to straight and back to crooked. So I straightened it out, tightened down the bolts on the toilet, and hoped that would do the trick.

Those of you who know anything about toilets know that did not do the trick. It’s amazing how, after close to 40 years of home ownership, there is still a lot we need to learn about maintaining a home.

The following weekend, when I pointed out the small water stain in the kitchen ceiling just under that toilet to my brother-in-law Jim, he told us it is not a good sign when toilets wiggle back and forth. He said we needed to replace something called a wax ring, which he did during his one day visit to the lake.

The third weekend – a weekend when we had a fairly large crowd up there – involved the second toilet – the toilet in the finished basement. Again, water was discovered on the bathroom floor – but this time quite a bit of water. I was asked to find a plunger because I’m the one who knows where these types of things are kept. When I went to retrieve the plunger from the adjoining laundry room in the unfinished portion of the basement, I found more water. Smelly water. Coming from the sewage ejector pump. 

After cleaning up the water and cordoning off all sources of water in the basement so no one would use them, I managed to find a plumber who could come out on Monday. He suspected the float inside the pump was getting stuck and tripping the electrical outlet. He told me I could plug the pump in after every couple of flushes and then unplug it again. I was skeptical that the current guests would remember to do that, so I had those staying on that floor truck up to the bathroom on the main level when necessary.

The plumber did come out that Monday – a couple hours late – and told me I was all set. I asked him what he had done. He said he shook the pump to free up the float. I asked him how much. He said $175.

Thank goodness this was in time for our next guests the following weekend – my cousin, his wife, their son, and my grandparents.

My grandfather is in a wheelchair, and very little thought was given to accessibility when the lake house was built in the early 80’s. So we spent some time making things more accessible. My brother’s first question to me when he showed up on Saturday was “You’ve done some remodeling?” Since the door frames are only 29” wide, we had to take off the doors to the bedroom my grandfather was using and the main floor bath. Since there were only three people willing to use a bathroom with no door, our guests did a reverse commute this weekend. They trucked down to the basement bathroom.

I was still a little nervous about that ejector pump though. I wasn’t sure that $175 had bought us a trusty fix. So, at 10:00 Friday night, I brought Justin, Sara, Tyler, and Nicole into the laundry room to give them a lesson on how to check the pump after every flush and to kick the pump to free up the float as needed. Nicole and Tyler asked excellent questions involving contingency planning. (David was MIA for this lesson. He said he didn’t use that toilet. I told him I had just seen him go down there.)

Saturday was spent looking for a lost dog we were babysitting (he was two docks down visiting with that family) and getting a 160 lb wheelchair-bound man on a boat. So no time for toilets that day.

On Sunday, we wheeled my grandfather down to the basement so he could instruct us on how to maintain the ejector pump. I insisted my brother join us since I refuse to be the sole maintainer of that piece of machinery. He was surprisingly good about removing debris (toilet paper?) from the tank using a stick, but every time we flushed the toilet to test the pump he would bellow “Here comes the smell!” as he ran from the room. 

After my grandparents were safely packed into my cousin’s car and on their way home, I mentioned to my brother that I was still nervous about the pump working right. He said “Have Jim fix it. He’s good at that stuff.”

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned a half toilet. A commode. But I won’t say much more about that one to protect the privacy of the person using it. But there are stories.