Surgery , Vacation & How I Defeated the Toilet

I get a wonderful little vacation this week. Well I suppose I shouldn’t say “wonderful”– it is nice though. I have to take 7-10 days off to recover from my surgery on Tuesday. I’ll spare our readers from the gory details, suffice to say, I’ve been in a lot of pain for the past few weeks. It’s only a fifteen minute operation, and I had a similar procedure two years ago, so I’m not really worried about it.

Our bathroom decided to explode last week. First, our toilet was flushing strangely, so I replace the flapper. It got worse. So I replaced the ballcock (the piece that refills the tank). That fixed one problem, but another problem arose in the form of the toilet running constantly. So I replaced the flush valve (the part the flapper sits on), that didn’t work. So replaced all the rubber washers, it helped, but now I had a leak coming out from between the tank and the bowl. So I replaced that rubber washer again. In the process I broke the flush valve and had to go down to Lowe’s yet again to get a new one. Finally it’s working.

However while doing all this I also got the idea in my head to clean the sink drain - we had been having problems with it clogging and no amount of drain-o was working. After undoing all the pipe connections I noticed that, indeed, the pipes were filled with goo. I cleaned these out, and put the pipe connections back on, turn the faucet on - little spouts of water dripping everywhere from the elbow joint. Upon further inspection I noticed that several holes had been repaired in the past and my twisting and turn the pipes must have chipped away the very weak repair job. Lowe’s saw a lot of me that week, not to mention my money.