Toilet trouble

A few days back I wrote about our first house in Omaha, Nebraska. I'll now attempt to answer questions raised by Gentle Readers regarding the bathroom with its yellow fixtures.

The house was a little tract house, built in the late-Fifties. The brown wall tiles were original to the house. The brown tiles went half-way up the walls behind the yellow bathtub and sink. The crinkle mirror tiles above them were probably added by the same aesthetically-challenged previous owner who painted the green stripes on the exterior of the house. The brown went with the pastel fixtures better than some of the other colors the builder used, like swamp green tiles with pink fixtures...

Sometimes you have to work with no budget. By the time I got the bamboo window shade, and put a 3 foot square oil painting of fossil turtle shells on one wall, it got to be a cute bathroom. Then one night the yellow toilet tank spontaneously cracked apart. The only credit card we had was Sears, so we rushed to Sears and bought a yellow toilet. Sears would bring it the next day and install it, but they had no yellow toilet seats in stock. They would order one, and let us have a "loaner", which is a pretty bizarre concept.

We waited for months for the yellow toilet seat. I would call Sears every few weeks to check on the status, and they would say it was back-ordered. Finally one store clerk realized that something was wrong with the order. The clerk who originally wrote up the order for us entered the store number, 256, in the space for quantity ordered instead of one. Can you imagine if a truck had pulled up and delivered 256 yellow toilet seats?

Jump to last evening. My toilet was running and running. I asked Mike what he did to it. He said he took the lid off, and messed around with the handle and float and flapper.

This morning the toilet was running laps again, plus, it wouldn't flush. I headed off to Home Depot to buy a new flush valve flapper and flush handle. I installed those, did the plunger dance, burned incense, prayed for forgiveness for offending the 256 yellow toilet seats. Mike finally woke up and mumbled something about "the black thing in the hole being upside down maybe". I had no clue what he was talking about. He staggered downstairs, and took a black cup from the pipe below the flush valve flapper. He inverted it, and went back to bed.

At this point the situation deteriorates further, and the little black cup thingie won't come back out of the pipe. I start reading instructions for removing the tank from the toilet. My vocabulary heats up. I try one last removal attempt with a screwdriver, and the black cup thingie pops out. Lo, and behold, it is the little hat that belongs on top of the fill valve column. The toilet is happy. I am happy. Ten dollars and two and a half hours of how not to fix a toilet. At least nothing was back-ordered.

That is my salute to Mr. Clapper, inventor of the flush toilet. Now we are leaving to hear Mr. Clapton at the Cotton Bowl.