Installing a new Toilet
There was an article linked from the home page of Fox News recently describing how to install a toilet. It was a good article, but was short on pictures. So, we thought we'd also describe the process, but show you what we did each step of the way. The process takes just a couple of hours and requires no special tools or techniques. The toilet is definitely one of the most used seats in the house, and the benefits of installing a new model you are comfortable with are immense.
For our project, we are in the kid's bathroom. This is one room we haven't done much with yet, and in fact, to our knowledge, no one has ever replaced or upgraded the toilet since the house was built 22 years ago. That's because, for some inexplicable reason, the countertop extends across the toilet. That means, no one has opened it, cleaned the inside, or upgraded any of the internal systems in 20+ years.
I honestly have no idea why anyone would want to install a countertop and toilet in this manner. It's impossible to service the toilet. In fact, in order to replace the thing, we had to make the decision to either replace the entire counter or else cut off the piece that extended over the toilet. We elected to cut the counter, since the rest of it was working just fine and there was no need to make this into a bigger project than what it was.
In the engineering world, we call the tendency for projects to grow and grow "requirements creep". Slowly, a project starts small and then creeps forward, a requirement at a time, until it's huge. Luckily, we avoided that this time around and just did what was required to get the toilet installed.
The project began with a straight line marking the countertop edge we wanted to cut off. Armed with my handy reciprocating saw, I cut down the line until I was close to the wall. Due to the design of the saw, I wasn't able to get right up to the wall and needed to use the hand saw to finish the job.
It turned out that I was a little too ambitious with the reciprocating saw. I ended up a bit too close to the wall when tilting the saw and hit the wall on the underside. It can be patched, but it's a lesson learned.
In the next post, I'll go through the remaining cleanup and prep steps before the toilet is installed.
