Hall Bath Temporary Fix

How long could you tolerate a bathroom with 50 year old carpet?

We lasted one month. While the hall bath renovation was far away in the master plan of updating this house, there are some things we just couldn’t live with.

For starters, carpet in a bathroom is super gross. What once was beige, had turned a sickening dark brown from people stepping out of the shower and dripping water over the same spot since (presumably) the seventies.

And then there was the issue of the toilet. The green, short, enormous toilet. This thing was a tank. It took a minimum of three gallons of water just to flush. So when we finally reached a breaking point and had to tear out the carpet, we knew the toilet had to go too.

But that sucker wouldn’t go without a fight. Because the four (yes, four, not your standard two-bolt toilet) bolts attaching it to the floor were completely rusted through, we had no choice but to smash the base of the toilet in order to remove it. Once the toilet was out of the way, we went to stopper the sewer pipe so we could breathe safely while redoing the flooring before installing the new toilet. Only the stopper was smaller than we realized…

It fell in.

On a Sunday night when our only hope was to pay the ridiculous fee to call an emergency plumber, it fell in. When the plumber arrived around 9pm he basically took one look and said “Yeah, I don’t have the tool for that.” So he left and put us on the waiting list for the regular plumber to come save us the next day. Except we were so far down on that list that he wasn’t going to make it till Tuesday.

Did you know that when you have a septic tank and you drop something large down the sewer drain you can’t use any water in the house for fear of sending said large object into the septic tank and damaging it irreparably? We had to turn off the water. Thank goodness for the outbuilding having it’s own water line and bathroom! Still, having to walk across the driveway to use the facilities is less than desirable and brings to mind the old days of going out back to use the privy.

We definitely did not want to wait till Tuesday. So Trey did what he does best, he used his mad internet skills to problem solve. And what he found was a camera on a long scope with a magnet on the end.

I don’t even remember how long it took, crouched there, holding a flashlight and peering into the sewer with the bathroom window open to give us some fresh air. Trying to fish a three inch stopper out of a four inch pipe with a magnet smaller than a pencil eraser is very tedious work. But after what felt like an eternity of holding our breath and praying, we finally got it! VICTORY!!! But wait…

Upon further inspection, we discovered that in all our toilet smashing, a rather large piece of ceramic had fallen down the pipe as well. Ceramic is not magnetic. Not even a little bit. Enter the tiny grabber tool. If we thought fishing out the stopper with a magnet was hard, fishing out a broken piece of toilet with a grabber was next level. It was like a twisted version of the claw game where the stakes were much higher.

More breath holding, lots of praying, a fair amount of cussing, and we finally got it. I have never been so happy to grab something covered in poop in my entire life (don’t worry, we had on gloves). Now we attached the appropriately sized stopper, called an canceled the plumber, and I got to work on our temporary solution to the floor: sticky tile.

Because we knew that this wasn’t the final plan for the bathroom, we needed a flooring solution that was both cheap and, you know, not fuzzy. I had installed sticky tile in a kitchen some twenty years ago and had enough memory to make fairly quick work of it. Once the new tile was down, it was time for the pièce de résistance: the shiny, new, WHITE (not green) toilet. I’d never seen anything more beautiful in my life. No more going outside down the steps, across the driveway, up the ramp, through the door, across Trey’s office to the bathroom!

While this fix is only temporary, it made a MASSIVE impact. We’ll get to the peeling wall paper and replacing the tub and vanity somewhere down the road. But at least for now our only working bathroom (more on that later) wasn’t disgusting. Whew.