Toilet Tales

As you can imagine, here in the Chronicles of Crap household the toilet is almost like a part of the family. And since we only have one bathroom, it's also one of the most coveted seats in the house:) Keeping it happy, clean and flowing is PARAMOUNT, especially for how hard we make it work.

Well this weekend, we had a little slip up in the toilet pampering department. Before I tell you what happened let me go back a little bit in our toilet tales.

The first apartment the hubs and I lived in was about 750sq ft, which of course means our bathroom was tiny! And the other tough part was there was a built-in dresser right in front of the toilet. Not so much a problem for me, but posed a bit of a problem for the hubs seeing as he's 6ft tall;)

When we finally moved four years later, the bathroom in our next apartment was like a palace. Big, not crowded, nice. The building was built in the 1940s so it had a lot of charm but as you can imagine there were some things that hadn't been updated in quite a while. At first all seemed well with the toilet, but after sitting on it a few times, we realized that it definitely leaned to the right. I mean you felt lopsided while on it. Now this would just be a minor inconvenience, but as much as it got used it seemed that the lean caused the toilet to clog very easily. The plunger got A LOT of use in that apartment, I'm talking at least four times a day in the height of my UC flares. Annoying and gross.

So when we bought our house, we were happy to say goodbye to the leaning toilet of crap. We've been here almost two years, and you all know my toilet troubles over that time, and I am happy to say that we have only used the plunger ONE time since we moved in. Well that was until this weekend...

On Saturday afternoon we noticed the flush was a little sluggish, but everything went down and we moved about our business. But it happened again later so the hubs decided it was time to take action. He got out the trusty plunger from the shed and sweat a bit as he tried to loosen whatever was going on in there for about 20 minutes. When that didn't work, he went back to the shed and got out the toilet snake (yes we have a small toilet snake, the toilet in the apartment was THAT bad.) He tried to snake the toilet and well that didn't work either. He then went with our friend to H.ome D.epot and bought a bigger snake, 20 ft to be exact. They returned and were in there trying that snake for about another 20 minutes. At this point, we knew things weren't going well. It was time to find an emergency plumber on a Saturday night -- I mean there is NO WAY we can live without a toilet.

Luckily after a few calls we founds somebody that could come out. Mr. R.ooter! The guy showed up about an hour later and he was awesome, so nice. Long story short, after he tried to snake the toilet with his professional equipment it was decided that in order to get whatever the problem was he had to take the whole toilet OFF. Yes you read that right, he had to take the toilet off it's little perch. After doing this and snaking for a while the clog was FINALLY cleared. The culprit, all those handy C.lorox wipes I've been using to clean up the toilet multiple times a day -- OOPS!

Ok, ok I know you are all saying, "Oh Al, everyone knows those can't be flushed." Well not me, I didn't read the container and I just thought they would break down like the good old TP does. Boy was I wrong. Merry Christmas to us.

Thankfully the guy was awesome and really cut us a break on the price, we now have a plumber for any future incidents and our pipes are good and clear. Oh the joys of home ownership.

So while the hubs was minorly stressed during the whole incident, I kept thinking I can't believe we haven't had a toilet trauma in this house in almost two years. I almost think that was a Christmas Miracle up to this point.

So the morale of the story is, at least in this household: The only thing that goes in the toilet -- aside from the obvious:) -- is toilet paper (two-ply C.ottonelle to be exact). Thank you. The end!