Flush Damn You!

Our toilet has been broken for about a week and a half now. The flapper stopper broke off, so when we clicked the handle, the drain would stay open, keeping the toilet running till we jiggled it.

Part of the Cushion Family tree, has a slogan carved in it. Near the base it says, "Never leave well enough alone." The other side says, "If you can do something faster and with less reliability, do it, it'll work out in the end."

So my dad and I have the lid of the toilet off, and we both keep messing with it. I bought a super cheap replacement flapper, rather than buying a whole new system from the plumber. So when my Dad got home that evening we tried to put it on. Well the old piece is one solid piece of plastic so you can't just replace the flapper part. During this attempt, my dad cut the chain to the flush lever. So now for the rest of the holiday we had to reach our hands into the tank and manually open and close the flapper.

Friday rolls around. My mom and I go buy a full replacement drain system from the plumber. It turns out, our flapper is perfectly fine. There is a small plastic tab on the bottom of the drain tube that broke off. So now with replacement in hand we head home. Friday goes by, and my Dad and I do nothing. Saturday goes by, and my dad and I do nothing.

Today gets here. We start talking, and decide to ghetto-rig the toilet without actually installing a single new part. We took a coke tab and super glued it onto the drain tube, so now the flapper stops and works properly.

We know this is probably going to break again soon enough, but it was a free fix, and it took us five minutes.

Honestly, we had two choices. Spend a day, and fix it in a way that it would be fine for another 25 years. Or half ass for 20 minutes and have a ready to break toilet that we will probably have to fix it again by the end of the year.

I think we made the right choice.