Yesterday. Yesterday was the crappiest day of my life. Work was, well, work… it wasn’t too bad, actually. No, the crap didn’t start until I got home from work. My son started it, actually; if I were Homer Simpson I’d be wringing the little brat’s neck, but as it is, I just get to dream about it.
He broke the toilet.
Now, to be fair, I’m not sure exactly how – I have my suspicions, and the loud thumping noises from inside the bathroom indicate, to me, a willful and deliberate desire to misbehave, which in turn OBVIOUSLY led to the destruction of the porcelain throne, but my wife believes that the tyke is innocent, that it was ‘coincidence’, an ‘accident’, and well, you know, ‘these things happen’.
Bah. He did it a-purpose, I tells ya.
The scene: The Boy is in the bathroom, thumping away merrily. My wife and I are in the living room, where each thump from the bathroom is raising my blood pressure one… thump… at a time… Finally, the flush, and out he comes, whistling cheerfully, carefully closing the door behind himself. I notice that he’s leaving damp spots on the carpet as he crosses the living room.
“Tater Tot,” I say in my most authoritative voice, “why are your shoes wet?”
“I dunno.” BAH! The brush off! The first answer of any kid who knows full well you know he’s done something wrong, but he’s not going to give an inch that he doesn’t have to.
“What were you doing in the bathroom?”
“Daaa-dddyy…” he sighs. “I was pooping.” Like I’m an idiot for asking. As if this was the most OBVIOUS THING IN THE WORLD.
My wife chimes in – she’s no fool, she can see the steam beginning to escape from my ears – and says, “What daddy means is, what was that thumping noise?”
“What thumping noise?” he says, innocent-like. The pressure gauge inside my skull sounds an alert… I’ve got five minutes max until the boiler explodes, I can feel it. I cut back to the heart of the matter.
“Your shoes. They’re wet. Why?”
“Shoes?” he says, looking down as if to say, ‘I have shoes? What are these things called shoes?’
“I’m going to go check on the bathroom,” I say to Sofawife. Mostly to get away from the Tater Tot’s ‘innocent’ act. Damn kids.
I mosey on down the hall, open the door… and physically recoil at the sight in front of me. Sewage covers the bathroom floor. Most of the water has, by this time, trickled down through the floorboards via the gap around the soil pipe, and into the (as we discovered later) basement – right on top of the washing machine, oh lovely – but the remaining sludge is… everywhere, it seems. The toilet sits there, apparently unharmed, but it’s obviously the source of the problem, as it’s smack in the middle of the puddle. Curiously enough, the bowl is not brimming with foulness – it’s about as full as it should be, of (relatively) clean water, no less.
I hear the front door slam and my wife approaching. “Honey, Tater Tot’s going across the street to play. What’s that smell – oh my god.”
If I wasn’t so pissed at him, I’d be proud of my boy – he obviously has already learned the art of self-preservation.
I lean in carefully and give the toilet an experimental flush. What the hell, the floor’s already fouled. Water gushes from under the bowl, and I notice that the bolts which are supposed to hold the toilet in place are wobbly-looking. In a flash of inspiration, I know what the thumping noise was: Tater Tot was rocking the toilet bowl like a hobby horse as he did his ‘business’. I’m gonna kill him. I tell the wife as much.
Sofawife, bless her, doesn’t waste time pondering the problem. She’s a smart gal. She knows that I’m going to pop my cork – the flames shooting out of my skull are probably a hint – and she knows EXACTLY how to redirect that rage that burns with the fires of a thousand suns*. “Honey,” she says, “I’ll get some rags and get this cleaned up. Go to the hardware store and get whatever it is you need to fix this. Okay?”
Grunt. Nod. Drive. Try not to plow through neighbors house in order to crush boy under wheels of car.
When I return (markedly less incensed), she’s cleaned it up – mostly – and has made sure The Boy will not be home for the next couple of hours. And she’s recruited a friend of ours to help me perform emergency surgery on my bathroom.
Oh my god, the bathroom. Fixing the toilet was a comedy of errors from the start. The shutoff valves? Yeah… they’re valves in the sense that turning them one way or the other has no noticeable effect on how well the toilet fills with water. Yet you HAVE to get the water out, or lifting the toilet cannot happen.
We cut off water to the entire house, which solved THAT problem.
Next: the tank bolts? Um… yeah. They spun freely. Yet the tank does not leak. I have no idea how that happens, but I knew that, short of a sledgehammer, that tank was not coming off the bowl. Fine. We disconnected the feed line, sponged out the remaining water in the bowl (ooh, GROSS), and lifted the toilet, tank and all, off the soil pipe.
Did I already mention the smell? The rank, pervasive odor of human excrement? Yeah… well, let me tell you, if you’ve never seen a used soil pipe under a toilet, you do NOT want to.
Now, if you’ve never had to examine the innards of your average thundermug (lucky bugger), you may not know what resides under all that gleaming porcelain. Between the soil pipe (drain, in other words) and the bottom of the toilet is a wax ring, so named because it’s, um, made of wax, in the shape of a ring. The job of this ring is to form a watertight seal between the bowl and the pipe, in such a way that whatever you flush goes right down the pipe, never to be seen again… and more importantly, never to besmirch your nice clean floor.
Yeah. This ring was squished flat on one side and peeled away from the pipe on the other. The rocking motion had done it’s job – the ring was toast. Fortunately, I had picked up a spare at the store, because I’d a hunch what I’d find under there.
Next was cleanup. I won’t go into too many details, but it was FOUL. Tater Tot had apparently had a bit o’ the runs, is my guess. I took a dry heave break a few times.
Finally we finish cleanup. Because of the nature of the leak, we ended up replacing several floor tiles (vinyl, fortunately) in the area around the toilet. I had the new ones on hand because I’d planned to re-floor the bathroom next time I got a DIY bug up my butt, but I hadn’t planned on doing it NOW. Re-mount the toilet – an interested challenge when you can’t turn it over because the tank is still attached, I might add – turn the water back on, panic and frantically turn the water back off because we forgot to attach the feed line to the tank and created a nice artesian well for a few minutes in the bathroom, sponge up the fresh spillage, CONNECT the damn line, and turn the water on AGAIN…
Suffice it to say that, in the space of about two and a half hours, I re-floored my bathroom and re-seated (with a new ring and bolts) my toilet, all because my SON decided to break the first one.
And his penalty? “Oh, hon, you don’t know that he broke it. That toilet’s old, it could have happened to any of us, it was just an accident. These things happen.” My wife is the forgiving sort. I want him keelhauled.
The crappiest day of my life.
** c’mon, it was too good a chance to pass up. :)*
