Yes, Yes, I Am Actually Alive!!

And yes, I do realize it has been over a week since my last post... I Am So Sorry!! We have gotten ourselves mixed up in a complete bathroom renovation, and boy this 69 year old house had some surprises in store for us! On Tuesday night the Mr. took out the vanity and toilet and took down the fake tile look cardboard stuff. The wall behind the board was not salvageable so he ripped out all the plaster from four feet high down to the floor. On Wednesday we put up drywall and I spackled while he was at work. Wednesday night and Thursday he fussed with putting the toilet in which is where things started going south, I will get to that in a minute... Also on Thursday I went to order the sink, which as luck would have it was going to take "around a week" to come in. Sheesh!

So, I don't know what the people were thinking when they "fixed" the bathroom before, but they somehow thought that having a flange on the toilet wasn't necessary. Yeah, the (rusty, corroded) bolts were cemented into the floor and the wax ring was just sitting directly on the floor! Furthermore, they fitted some new pipe into the "poop hole" and cemented it in but didn't make sure it was level while the concrete was setting, so the pipe was crooked. So when the Mr. brought home a new flange and put it on it wouldn't sit level, and he couldn't shimmy it to where it was level because then it wouldn't sit flush with the floor. He got a metal bit and for the next three days, between working at his real job, getting three hours of sleep per night and me shoving food in his mouth so he wouldn't have to go through a two hour decontamination process just to get dinner in his belly, he was grinding the metal pipe to the point where he could fit the flange on correctly.

YAY! Or so we thought... After correcting the ID10Ts slap job of getting the toilet (they just kept reinstalling the original toilet, by the way... BLECH!!) in, the Mr. put in our new Lowe's toilet, which went fine until he put the tank on the back. Hmmm... it wouldn't fit. The bowl was right against the wall, literally touching the wall, so the tank couldn't fit, the bolts to attach the two together wouldn't even match up! URG!! Well, after yet another trip to Lowe's we found someone who actually knew what he was talking about! He said that we needed a toilet with a 10" setback (which is the distance between the wall and the bolts in the floor) which is something most people "nowadays" don't know about. Of course, Lowe's and the other big box home improvement stores don't stock that kind, but he could order it for us and it would arrive in three to ten days (Lets see, it's Saturday, and I've had to shlep down to the basement to pee since Tuesday, what's another week-and-a-half) OR we could try some small plumbing stores, one of which was the store where we ordered our sink. YIPPIE!! So we run right over to that store only to find out they were closed on Saturday and Sunday.

Well, at 8AM this morning I was on the phone calling this store, but no one answered. Wait 30 minutes. Called again. Yep, they have 10" "rough in" toilets. They probably have a couple in stock. They'd cost around $125.00 - less than we paid for our Lowe's potty. Told the Mr. and he jumped out of bed and ran (well, drove, actually) over there. An hour later he was bringing our new toilet through the door! Then he bathed really fast, dressed, grabbed his lunch and ran off to work. So, maybe with a little bit of luck and a lot of prayer I will at least have a potty up here before I go to bed tonight. I guess I can keep dreaming about my inspiration bathroom: