Personal essays
In search of the right replacement part
The leak
I’m sitting in the living room reading and I hear the toilet in the hall refilling.
I get to the end of the page and start to stand up when the sound stops.
A half hour or an hour later and there’s that sound again.
Even though I miss the filling again, I go into the bathroom and hear a quiet drip from the tank.
I take the lid off the tank and it’s not a mechanism I recognize. I’m used to the flapper type and have replaced many of those. This looks almost like a plunger that lifts up to flush and then settles back down into place.
I don’t know how to fix this one so I put the lid back on and figure I’ll deal with it after my guests come and go.
The first expert
I take the blade off my electric lawn mower and take it in to one of three favorite hardware stores.
While I’m there I describe the toilet issue and ask what I need.
The guy walks me to a package with two gaskets in it. He tells me to use this one if it’s a Kohler and the other one if it’s an American Standard. He explains that there are some models that neither one fits.
I take it home and look at the leaking toilet and see that neither one will fit.
I turn off the the water to the toilet. See - it’s not leaking any more. Actually, it’s still leaking it just doesn’t fill to compensate anymore.
Instead of using the downstairs bathroom I go up and use Maggie’s bathroom at the top of the stairs. I flush the toilet and it doesn’t stop filling.
I take the lid off that tank as well and see the that it has a similar but more modern plunger mechanism that also isn’t sealing. I turn the water off to this toilet as well and text Maggie to ask about the leak.
“I’ve been telling you for a long time,” she answers.
It turns out there’s good news. One of the gaskets I bought for the downstairs toilet fits perfectly.
I put the sharpened blade back on my mower and feel an unusual amount of accomplishment. The mower is ready for the season and the upstairs toilet doesn’t leak anymore.
The second expert
After meeting a friend for coffee I head across the street to my second favorite hardware store. This time I had taken a picture of the valve before leaving the house.
The guy comes out from behind the counter to help me. I show him the picture and he says, “it’s a Mansfield” and starts walking to the back of the store.
I follow.
He hands me the gasket. This one looks more like it. He tells me what I need to unscrew to get the piece to lift up far enough that I can make the repair.
“Oh,” he says pointing at a replacement toilet handle, “you’re going to need this too.”
It’s a special handle that is long enough that if the toilet doesn’t seal properly you lift up on.
“Oh,” I say back. “The toilet used to have that kind of handle. When it broke I replaced it with a cheap ordinary one that never worked quite right.”
He nods. No judgement. He takes the handle out of the package to demonstrate that the threads work backwards.
I head home and ten minutes later have a second working toilet.
Feeling good
I’m not handy at all.
Even so, I didn’t want to call out a plumber for something that seemed so ordinary.
I saved some amount of money by doing the work myself - but it wasn’t about the money.
It felt like I accomplished something.
“Daniel,” you point out, “there are a lot more things around your house that need ‘accomplishing’.”
Perhaps. But this was different. I got to interact with two mechanisms that were unfamiliar to me.
I know that there are YouTube videos for everything, but I love that I live in a world where there are people at my local hardware store who know what I need and what I need to do with it.
“But Daniel,” you say, “the first guy got it wrong.”
Maybe.
I didn’t show him a picture and my description of the downstairs toilet matched the upstairs toilet so I think that’s worth partial credit if not almost all of the credit.
The toilet upstairs is fifteen years old while the one downstairs is forty years old.
How do I know that? The year 1983 is stamped inside the tank.
I worry that the local hardware stores won’t be around much longer and I worry even more that the folks who work there who know everything won’t exist.
But for now, I have a sharpened mower blade and two toilets that no longer leak and feel really as good about that as I did about shipping a new book last week.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 215. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe