Today it started with a lose bolt that holds down the toilet.  Actually, the bolt was gone – beyond gone.  Rusted away.  I figured the flange thing that the bolts go into was probably busted too, but you can’t tell until you lift up the whole toilet.

When starting a project like this, I always go to youtube first.  What a lucky time to live in that we have a resource like this.  Of course it wasn’t just the broken bolt.  I needed to replace the wax seal too.  As long as I’m working on the toilet, I should also replace that tank fill valve that was slightly leaking.

Oh wait! When I turn off the water to the toilet with the shutoff valve, that is leaking too!  After a trip to the hardware store and multiple rounds of turning off the water to the whole house, I finished the job.  The seat doesn’t rock, the shutoff valve doesn’t leak, and the fill valve stops when fill.  Oh, how about a quick advertisement for those quarter-turn shutoff valves?  My house has these “multi-turn” valves that are like the kind on your outdoor water hose.  I’ve already had two of these leak – so that’s not so good.  Also, when the toilet overflows (it happens), the quarter turn is faster to shut off.

Photo: Rhett Allain

I’m just going to say one other thing about toilets (this is not a toilet post).  It seems like a pretty simple job – but once you get confined in space, everything gets just a little bit more complicated.

OK, but in the end – it’s finished.  In the end, I’m pretty happy.  I feel like I accomplished something.  I fixed something and made it better.  I feel human.

I wasn’t always like this.  I remember in my early adult years I would think:

Why can’t they just make toilets that don’t break?  For that matter, why not make a lawn that doesn’t need mowing.  Oh, how about clothes that don’t need washing?  All of this cleaning an fixing stuff is just taking away time from more important stuff.

That was the old me.  The new me doesn’t mind these chose so much.  Oh, I still get bothered sometimes.  When the lawn needs mowing and it’s super hot (or won’t stop raining) or when something breaks and you JUST KEEP MESSING UP.  Yes, those times are frustrating.

But I’ve come to accept that we live in a world that increases in entropy.  If you leave stuff alone, it will just mess up and eventually break.  What makes humans so awesome is that we can fight this tide of increasing disorder.  We fix things.  We clean things.  We are humans.