DIY: Toilet Replacement

05/06/2017

They say that it is one of the eas­i­est DIY projects you can do. Even know­ing the rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple anato­my of the toi­let and the whole process, I was still daunted…mostly by the unknowns. Turns out, they’re right. For the most part. So here, I’m going to detail the process I went through.

The Prob­lem: A leak. Not from the easy to repair places either. It was from between the bowl and the tank some­where and had been like that for months. No amount of patch­ing could do any­thing to it. Try­ing to ignore the prob­lem, I’d left a con­tain­er to catch the water and until this past week the drip­ping had been once every hour or so. Going from that to a full con­tain­er in 10 hours meant…OH YEAH…time to do some­thing about it. Not to men­tion, the water bill had cer­tain­ly been tak­ing a hit, and on top of it all the smell!!

The Research:YouTube would of course be the first  place for most peo­ple to turn to, but hav­ing been a sub­scriber to Fam­i­ly Handy­man mag­a­zine, I turned there first and lo and behold they have sev­er­al guides! And not just a guide either, but guides in case some­thing goes wrong. I rec­om­mend check­ing out the arti­cles here.

The Mate­ri­als: Read the arti­cles found above. The most impor­tant part before search­ing for a new toi­let is mea­sur­ing the area and the rough-in (dis­tance from the wall to the pipe which is about the bolt). I made the mis­take of mea­sur­ing every­thing except the rough-in. Thank­ful­ly mine was the stan­dard 12in, and not the hard to find 10 or 14 inch ones. Most of the tools nec­es­sary you’ll prob­a­bly already have around the house.

The Pro­cure­ment: As a dum­my who did­n’t mea­sure the right mea­sure­ment, we went to look, and it was all for the bet­ter any­ways because for some rea­son every­one want­ed to replace their toi­lets at the same time. There were no toi­lets left, real­ly. So instead, I gath­ered the minor mate­ri­als I need­ed, includ­ing a no-wax ring. Even­tu­al­ly went and got my toi­let with the help of my broth­er because darn it all those things are heavy.

The Process: I love demo. That has got to be my favorite part of doing any project like this. The instant I went to remove the tank from the bowl, the bolts con­nect­ing the two fell before I could do any­thing. Hmm. I think I found what the prob­lem was.

As usu­al I always get hang-ups when doing a DIY project because it’s nev­er exact­ly like they tell you on the guides. Instead of it being caulked to the floor, it was grout­ed and the peo­ple before us (this is how I know this has been a prob­lem) put caulk on top of THAT. Well. Grout isn’t
the eas­i­est thing to get rid of. Thank­ful­ly I have POWER TOOLS.

The wax ring was most­ly intact, and it lit­er­al­ly was just a ring of wax. I had to scrape it off with a put­ty knife and then tried to wipe the flange as well as I could. Which brings me to my next sur­prise which is that the flange was­n’t like in the guides along with the fact that the hole was not that pret­ty. Oh well. It worked fine.

The next part made me real­ly glad I was­n’t doing this on my own (I was all up until that point). Those parts are real­ly heavy and even more heavy put togeth­er. The shims were real­ly a very inte­gral part of this, and you should fol­low the instruc­tions when it says to shim the toi­let before you put the wax/no wax ring on. And by that, I mean, shim it, lev­el it, and then cut the shims before. Oh, and using the shims prop­er­ly would help too.

Then Boom. VOILA. It is DONE.

I must say that the chair height is very nice. The elon­gat­ed por­tion I did­n’t need as much, but it’s nice too. Took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to paint the wall behind the toi­let and fin­ished up my paint too. I had bought a ton of extra sup­plies just in case (I always seem to make mul­ti­ple store trips and did­n’t want to do that this time) so now after it all (and so far, so good…) I need to go return every­thing.

The best part about all of this? I used a gift card I’ve been sav­ing since Christ­mas because I knew it’d have to be replaced and to my sur­prise, I did­n’t need to spend any more than that!!

Here’s a side-by-side com­par­i­son.

The Ver­dict: Over­all it was­n’t bad. I did­n’t run into sig­nif­i­cant issues, just some minor unex­pect­ed ones…nothing pow­er tools can’t fix. The guy said that if you’re lucky it would take an hour start to fin­ish, but of course it took me much longer. I went shop­ping around 10am and final­ly was done clean­ing up around 3pm. I would say that it is one of the eas­i­er projects I’ve tack­led. Hav­ing the right and qual­i­ty tools always makes every­thing eas­i­er.