I am so proud of me - I fixed my toilet! Yeah, I know, it’s totally not a hard thing if everything goes right, and I’m certainly not non-handy, but I’ve tried in other houses and couldn’t get the valve to turn off, or one time I had the world’s weirdest toilet that wouldn’t take any flapper but the one it was born with, etc. So I was leery of it. So I procrastinated two years - kept saying I wanted to do it when my boyfriend was home in case we had a disaster, but I never got to it.
And it was stupidly trivially easy. I replaced the fill valve and did the flapper while I was at it. The shutoff valve turned like a dream (and that has NEVER happened to anybody I know) and everything went in exactly according to instructions. Blew my fragile little mind. Now my toilet doesn’t moan and howl, and hopefully it no longer leaks either.
Maybe those hypnotism sessions for procrastination are paying off? I mean, they’re supposed to be for running, but I guess “fix the toilet” was really being put off just like running was. At any rate, it’s probably cheaper than a plumber.
Next on my “had the parts for a year” world tour - when it’s daylight I’ve got to install this port so I can plug my iPhone into my car. I bought it ages ago and it’s been sitting on the table right in front of me.
So what have you finally gotten around to doing all by yourself? Installed something? Put something together? Fixed it?
Could you call my mom and encourage her? She’s had some problem where her toilet runs constantly for months. Her ‘temporary’ solution is to just shut off the valve. Then when you need to flush, you turn it on, let the tank fill up, and flush. It’s such an unpleasant bathroom experience. She never has any company except family so I guess somehow it’s not a priority for her. She doesn`t seem to realize we’re not that kind of family.
Dude, tell her the hard part is shutting off the valve!
I’ve fixed a toilet that did that - the flapper was rotted away. A super-easy fix, assuming you don’t have the picky toilet that doesn’t fit any flapper except the one. Next time you go to her house just bring a flapper and snap that bad boy in.
You can’t brag until you’ve replaced the Dreaded Wax Ring. :eek:
OTOH, I haven’t done anything impressive all by myself lately; replaced the battery in the car and cleaned up the DVR.
Does it count that instead of annually replacing the pressure switch on the well pump that I sealed the switch a couple of years ago so that the ants don’t immolate themselves and it doesn’t fail, burned with tiny insect corpses?
Hey, congratulations, it’s more than I know. I know what the bits in the tank do, but that’s only because I had to fix it when the chain lever thingy broke off. (I said I know what they do, I didn’t say I know what they’re called.) I mean, I consider myself relatively handy, but plumbing is something I know jack about.
I put together a 16" stand fan recently. I am not the most handy person around, being a totally clumsy person with tools and all that. It took me about 2 hours to both understand the instructions and put it together, but I feel great once I did it.
I’ve never been able to fix a toilet. Something always goes wrong, usually it’s that the nuts are so rusted that I end up cracking the tank. When we first moved into our house I broke the toilet on a Saturday and we spent the weekend crapping at the Wendy’s on Georgia Avenue (band name?). So, a tip of the hat to you.
I installed an entire new toilet by myself [except for the heavy lifting part. Latex medical gloves rule for keeping the hands gunkfree while peeling the old wax ring away!]
I built a platform with casters for my 4 drawer legal-size file cabinet. The platform is industrial strength; it would probably hold more weight than the cabinet could hold.
