Veni, Bibi, Vici

I fixed the toilet. It was actually never really broken in the first place but, in determining that, I broke it, so then I had to fix it after all.

Turns out there’s this little floaty foam-rubber bit on the flush chain and it was floating so hard that the rubber flappy bit was never sinking completely closed. I tried sliding the foam-rubber floaty bit up on the chain so it wouldn’t float so hard, but it gave me a hard time so I got mad and got the scissors and cut the damn thing off.

That’s how I discovered that the foam-rubber floaty bit is there to keep the rubber flappy part up long enough for the toilet to completely flush. Without it, the rubber flappy part just flops back closed and you have to hold the lever down to make the toilet work.

That explains why the other toilet doesn’t work, the one I replaced the guts on last year. I’ve fixed a bunch of toilets in my life, but this is the first I’ve ever heard of these floaty bits. Are they new?

Anyway, so I went to Lowe’s (which I hate, by the way, and which we call Blowe’s behind its back, but which is only a mile down the road so I always hatefully end up there) and got two flappy-chain-floaty kits to fix them both in one fell swoop. Took me a couple tries to get the right combination of chain length and floaty height to make it flush properly and still stop running when it’s supposed to, but I got it done. Took about a half an hour for the both of them. So glad I put it off so long.

I was going to do all this yesterday – I did, in fact, do the exploratory breaking yesterday – but I accidentally stopped at the beer store on my way to Lowe’s. I was just so proud of myself for having done the taxes. The plan was to get grass seed, too, while I was at Lowe’s, but I forgot.