Creative Problem Solving

 I like to think I may be a pretty ... ingenious fellow.

Sometimes I'm right.  Sometimes I'm something starts with an I, but with a different ending.  Dee Ten Tee, often.  

But we have a very small bathroom in our bedroom.  I suppose the modern term is "en suite" - or whatever.  It's a bedroom with a bathroom in it.  As I did not have anything to do with designing this layout, it's somewhat disturbing.  The bathroom has a small 30x30 inch shower stall in one corner, and there's almost enough room for me to walk behind the door into the small alcove in front of the shower to step into it.  There's a toilet and a sink, which are, I am told, minimal elements for a space to be considered a bathroom, and there's no permanent place to hang the toilet paper.  One of the four walls - one of the two long walls - is against concrete.  It's got a layer of drywall there, but not much beyond that.  And so it's cramped.

When we moved in the total storage space was a three-mirror-door medicine cabinet on the wall, below that was the vanity.  This vanity is perhaps fifteen inches deep and possibly eighteen inches wide.  The granite countertop is about 3" wide around all the edges, the square sink fills the top.  

That was it.  When we moved in, we first found a shelf at Ikea - it's about fourteen inches square and about five feet tall.  It almost fits in front of the toilet.  That is, if you intend to use the toilet, you have enough room to do so, but do not expect to be able to bend forward.  And we also found a sort of basket rack that fits between the toilet and the vanity for other necessary items.

About a year ago, I wanted some shelving above the toilet.  And after I finished figuring out what the total cost would be to build the shelf, then I found a unit in the particle board furniture section - you know, the stuff that's sawdust and glue between a couple of sheets of paper.  This particular item was about $40 - which was about half of what the lumber was going to cost me last year when lumber prices were still approaching orbital.  So we bought, assembled, and installed the thing.  And it does provide ample additional storage.

Unfortunately, it has also proven to provide a fair number of other issues.  About six weeks ago, we had some serious water backups in our plumbing.  We could not do two loads of laundry because the house drain was that ... compromised.  When we first moved in and experienced some issues with the plumbing, our landlord took us to task for a number of things, and so we sought to limit the amount of paper products we introduced to the plumbing.  

And while not being too indelicate, I will say that it is somewhat frustrating to have to limit the amount of toilet tissue you use to clean yourself.  It is what it is, I suppose, but come on.  Anyway, when the problem got bad this year, we alerted our new landlord, the folks who had taken over, about two years ago, from the old folks.  And these folks sent a plumber.  With a camera.  And he found, about halfway to the street, that the pipe, the pipe which had been installed some fifty or so years ago, was nearly fully occluded with mineral and hard water deposits.  

And yes, that happens here.  In fact, the town I live in does seem to have something of a terrible problem with extremely hard water.  Mind you, I grew up on well water, and our well water was so mineral-laden that if you left an outside faucet on just slightly to drip a little bit, you would find rust stains on the concrete.  Yeah.  From the water.  And we could see an orange-ish tinge in our whites, before my parents called the Culligan man and installed one of their filtering systems.

But the first major issue we had with the over-the-toilet cabinet was because the plumber did not find a cleanout hole.  That is, every home is supposed to have, somewhere, a connection where you remove a cover and can introduce all manner of equipment to the plumbing to remove things like roots which may have grown through the pipe and etc.  Little known trick - if some plumbing savant decides to replace the cleanout plug with a toilet, well, then we just flat out remove the toilet.

Yeah.  Shut off and empty the water, then remove the bolts holding the toilet to the floor, then remove the toilet - and you have access.  And you can run all manner of rude metal tools down into the grimy metal pipes, not having to worry about the porcelain which you might wreck if you do that.  Which is what the plumber did after we removed the cabinet, and he spent about an hour changing the pipe to the street from about an inch in diameter to a full five and a half inch-or so standard size pipe.  And we've not had any problems since.

Until yesterday, when I went to flush the toilet and it went "tink".  

For those fortunate among you to lack in-depth knowledge of the tank above your toilet, time to run away now.  Because that tank is a pretty special little reservoir.  It starts with a sort of heavy rubber flap at the bottom covering a hole.  That flap is what keeps the water in the tank until you push the silver lever down.  Inside the tank, attached to that little lever is a small metal rod.  At the end of the rod there's a length of chain that goes down to the flap.  When you push down, the chain lifts the flap up, and out goes the water, into the bowl.  When you let the lever go, it stays up for a little bit out of the way as the pressure of the water flowing into the hole maintains the opening.  Eventually the flap falls, and then the water - which has been running into the reservoir as soon as it started emptying - begins to accumulate.  Eventually, a float in the tank rises to a point where it uses another lever to turn off the in-flow of water.  Thus the toilet is ready for another flush.

But "tink" is the sound that little rod on the other side of the silver lever makes when it hits the top of the tank.  This happens when the chain, which is attached to the flap, and is also normally attached to the end of the lever, gets disconnected.  And that means that the chain does not lift the lever from the bottom of the bowl.  This prevents water from rushing in and taking what you left away.  It just stays there.  Until you figure out how to lift the flap.

And I'm what I hope is an efficiency expert.  That is, I really did not want to spend the hour or so emptying the cabinet, removing the upper portion, and opening up the tank to fish the chain out and reconnect it.  What I really wanted to do was to lift the top off the tank, squeeze my forearm into the tank, and get that chain connected.  

Then the solution in search of a problem bit me.  I spend a fair amount of time wandering home improvement stores. I am not shopping.  I am simply researching the available options for problem-solving.  And last year, I noticed a small device which reminded me of, well, a rescue tool.  Many years ago, watching TV shows that had various fire-fighters using various tools to extricate people from difficult situations, I recall seeing an air bag which was a high-strength material which was filled with air, compressed, and it pushed the material out of the way.  

At the local home improvement store, I found the micro version of this very tool.  It is about four inches by four inches square with a hose and a sort of bulb on the end.  If you've been in the doctor's office recently and they had the old-fashioned sphygmomanometer - that is, the device which checks your blood pressure with a cuff - that's the bulb gadget.  The other end is just a high-pressure air bag, normally empty.  

And so, to be sure I lifted evenly, and not off balance, I bought two of them.  I slipped them into the 1/4" between the top of the toilet tank and the bottom of the shelf unit's shelf, and started pumping.  A few squeezes later, the shelf unit had risen slightly over an inch and a half, which was exactly what I needed, because I needed to slide a couple of pieces of 2x4 below the sides of the shelving unit - to raise it an inch and a half.  Which was exactly what I needed to remove the top of the toilet tank, and I could then squeeze my beefy forearm into the tank and fish out the disconnected chain.  And connect it back to the lever.  

And flush the toilet.

So yeah, I fixed.