I guess it’s scatology week here at twoprops.net.
Sometimes, little changes can mean a lot.
Ever since we bought the island place, the one and only toilet has looked dirty. It wasn’t, but it had several chips in the lowest part of the bowl. My guess is that somebody dropped a screwdriver in it when installing it. They didn’t look like chips, though. They looked like, uh, skidmarks. I spent a lot of time scrubbing at them and even bought a new toilet brush and bleach, but it wasn’t until I drained the water out that I realized they were just damage to the porcelain finish.
Knowing what they were didn’t make them any less disturbing. Back in September, I bought a new toilet. Actually, I bought two as I was building the bathroom in the studio. I started to replace the toilet in the house — usually a pretty straightforward proposition — until I realized that I was going to be working with very old plumbing. I feared that I might run into problems I couldn’t immediately solve, and the only lua on the property would be out-of-commission. An unhappy state of affairs. I thought I’d wait until the studio toilet was working before messing with the one in the house.
The studio plumbing is taking longer than I expected. Things became critical when we leveled the bathroom floor and it opened a small gap between the toilet and the waste pipe. So I hired our fabulous handyman to do the replacement, as he has experience with this kind of ancient plumbing (it’s different from modern bathrooms). He converted the drain to modern standards and put in the new throne.
Since we now have electricity in the bathroom, I installed the wonderful electronic bidet seat (Biobidet 2000) that we moved with us but couldn’t use for lack of power. So we now have…
- a toilet without built-in skidmarks
- a drain that no longer leaks or smells
- an electronic bidet seat with heated wash and warm-air dry
The air dryer is more than just a luxury. Since we have limited sewage processing capability, and toilet paper tends to stress the septic system more than sewage does, having the dryer will help our septic system work better for longer. In addition, toilet paper has some environmental consequences. Since we have excess energy, any time we can use energy instead of stuff, it’s a win for the environment and our pocketbooks.
—2p