Can Do

Forget about Tucker Carlson, our imminent civil war, and the transvestites in Sports Illustrated. I have something important to talk about. My new toilet arrived.

Most of my house’s toilets are green-fantasy basket cases designed during the Clinton years. They’re so bad, the manufacturer quit supporting them. Think about that. A toilet should last 75 years, and they quit after maybe 10. Says a lot about their confidence in the product.

Before I left las puertas del infierno, as I like to call South Florida, I had Japanese Toto-brand toilets, and they never gave me a second’s trouble. I know the Japanese have a bizarre obsession with toilets. I would say Japanese toilets are the BMW’s of toilets, but BMW is overrated and makes unreliable cars. Still, I think you get the point. I have tremendous confidence in the competence of Japanese toilet makers, just as I would have tremendous confidence in the competence of Mexicans who weld other Mexicans into the diesel tanks of northbound trucks in Tijuana. The toilet that arrived today is Japanese, and it ran about twice as much as American.

I found out there are one-piece and two-piece toilets. The one-piece jobs are better. You don’t have to connect the tank to the bowl, so there are no gaskets to go bad. I went one-piece. A wise man knows a good toilet is an important investment.

My only regret is that this bowl doesn’t have a bidet built in, but I can add a bidet seat, so no worries there.

The nice thing about my old two-piece can is that it’s a lot easier to carry and put in the back of the car so I can take it to the dump. I yanked the tank off and put it in the garage, and then I managed to get the rusty nuts off the bowl base and move the bowl out.

Guess what? When my house was built, Albert Einstein was apparently working construction on the side, because the bowl was attached to the tiles not just with silicone, which is correct, but with some kind of grouty stuff. It’s like hard mortar. Now there is a ring of stone on my floor, and I have to get rid of it before the new bowl goes in.

If there is one thing I hate about Internet DIY information, it’s this: the jobs they do in videos almost always involve things that make sense. If you look at toilet videos, you will see toilet after toilet properly installed with silicone. You will see men in clean, freshly-ironed clothes pop toilets off and put new ones on in seconds, because the people who installed the toilets they’re replacing did things right. You won’t see the toilet some genius installed with JB Weld. Seems like I always get the weird cases no one on Youtube or any Internet forum can help me with.

Someone said I should use a plastic scraper to avoid scratching the tile. No; that would be like using plastic to cut a hole in a cinderblock. A stainless scraper would take an hour.

My answer? An oscillating tool with a scraper blade, followed by a Scotchbrite pad. It should work. I think the tile is too hard for carbon steel to scratch.

My toilet was attached to the flange with zinc-plated hardware. Whom do I talk to about that? How can I join a class-action suit?

Let’s be honest. I don’t care how clean men are. Sometimes they pee on stuff. Steel does not like pee. It doesn’t like bleach, and decent housekeepers use bleach on bathroom floors. If there is a good reason to use fast-corroding hardware on a bathroom floor, I can’t imagine what it is.

I had to use a Vise Grip to get my toilet’s nuts off. Traumatizing. I’m one of those people who would rather sell a house than continue to live there after some savage used a toilet plunger on the kitchen sink, so you can imagine how much I like having my face inches from an ancient toilet while I struggle with nuts I am pretty sure have decades-old pee on them.

I tried to clean things up before I started work, but there is a limit to what you can do with a toilet older than some governors.

It’s around two p.m., and I have probably washed my hands 15 times today. I’m still afraid to touch food.

When I’m done with this can, I have to think about the three I have upstairs. Moving a toilet across the house alone was no fun. Stairs will require paid help unless I go with two-piece toilets.

Maybe I’ll replace one can every 6 months or so. There is no rush.

Someone should make Al Gore eat these things.