From Handle to Remodel

It is interesting depressing how many projects a house can create. I think we have had more than our share recently. Tyler even said the 'M' word today, but I don't think he means it.

He is coming off an epic house project that all began with a corroded toilet handle. He says it much better in his own words and pictures. I took this from a file he shared with me. So you get the story right from the Stallion's mouth...

In October 2017, my friend Sparky pointed out that there was a corroded toilet flush lever in my main-floor guest bathroom. It took six months to fix it, mostly because I had to replace the entire bathroom to fix it. — Tyler Cazier

The flush handle was corroded, but the "fix" broke the porcelain reservoir. To fix the tank, I ended up replacing the toilet. To replace the toilet, I found the hardwood had water damage and rot. To get down to take a real look at the damage, I had to pull up the hardwood, which required removing the the sink and the trim. "Patching" the hardwood revealed water damage to subfloor...

The astute observer notices that months passed with no work done here. (You would only notice this if you could see the dates. He took out the toilet in October and we had no bathroom through April.) That would be because we couldn't decide what we were going to do with the floor. Rip it up? Patch it? Replace it? If so, what do we replace it with? Ultimately, the decision was to scrap the hardwood, and go to something else — tile maybe. With that decision made, removal of the hardwood was pretty fast.

After the hardwood was out, it was time to make a decision on the new flooring. Progress paused again. Then, Pearl had a baptism coming up, and Grandma Dargan came to town a week before the baptism. It became apparent that we needed a bathroom on the main level: Mom has difficulty with stairs, and besides you're about to have a house full of people this weekend and one of them is bound to want to use the bathroom. Where are they going to go? Point well made. I began in earnest to complete the bathroom. Decisions were being made with speed now. Speed, not haste.

Had to raise the subfloor on account of not replacing the hardwood, but electing for a much more waterproof vinyl solution. That black plastic is the code-required water barrier that would have prevented damage to the subfloor.

We almost had the new vinyl glued in, when I took a quick check at the closet flange, which was...naturally...damaged. This was indeed the root of the problem because some "genius" "fixed" the toilet because the drain had an improper angle. But INSTEAD of replacing it, they thought to themselves, "No, you know what, we'll screw with somebody in the future. That poor schmuck is going to have to disassemble their entire bathroom just to get down here and figure out this little shortcut and why everything above it is screwed up. Hahahaha. We'll totally get them." So I cut out the closet flange, and fixed it. Fixed it, see, not just dusted off some half-adzed band-aid solution that will fail later.

In the interest of time (impending baptism and its requisite household population increase) I had decided to rebuild the toilet and forego painting. I had no sooner finished bolting the tank and filling the toilet with water, than Maleen persuasively reminded me that we were going to paint. She was right. It just would have been a lot easier to paint *without* a toilet in there, or flooring for that matter.

Yes, if you ever have to paint behind a toilet, take a paint stirer and staple some 92-cent Wal-Mart hand towel strips to it. It will fit right behind the toilet, and Viola! It's painted. Work smarter people, not harder.

This has been an unrelenting education in unintended consequences. Each time more information was required to diagnose the problem, symptoms of another problem were exposed. Then that problem had to be solved before the previous problem could be addressed. Soon the chain stretched for seemingly dozens of problems, each waiting for a solution to the next problem in the chain before it could be addressed. The world turns on the the shoulders of people who can quickly diagnose a problem, and tenaciously attack that problem until it is solved, perhaps by unconventional, creative solutions. It is also an exercise in creativity to be able to constantly submerse one's brain in information in the hope that somewhere in that ocean of information, the brain will be able to start tying data points together and stitching together the fabric of a solution. If you stick at it long enough, though, you will find the solution.

Ya, that's me when I finished installing the sink...that started leaking just moments after I finished hooking it up. More than a few of those white hairs are what I call "knowledge hairs" that I grew during this bathroom experiment. I'm happy to report that the bathroom was functional when guests started arriving for Pearl's baptism. Sure, I may have made a profanity-laced trip to Lowe's that very morning to replace some leaky hardware, and I may have had a few pieces of trim that still were not installed — casting a sort of "ghetto lux" motif on the powder room, and I may have been wearing ear protection and pounding trim nails when the guests arrived, but could they pee in a real toilet? Yes, they could.

Now back to our sponsor (me!). The bathroom looks great. It is all finished and I am very pleased with it. It also fulfilled our April date requirement. We were supposed to paint a wall or room in the house and although we didn't paint 'together', this project totally counted. Robyn and I picked out paint colors. We matched the grey in the vinyl, although Granny V would agree with us that it looks brown, and then we found a nice blue to pop. The pop goes with the light switch and shows off our toilet paper cloud quite nicely. Robyn and I painted the grey/brown and Tyler and June came later to finish the blue. I even hung original art work by June in the bathroom. Here is how it looks now.

I even like the finishing strip. Tyler used raised screws which we might replace, but I think they look great. My favorite part by far is that it smells better. We could always tell something was wrong with the wood and it had a musty smell that always bugged me. Now, it is gone. And I love this little bathroom. Great job fixing the 'toilet' babe!