Toilet trouble

Tweet

The people who lived in this house before us did a lot of work modifying it to their own preferences, and one of those was plenty of bathrooms all done very neatly, i.e. with all the pipes etc, boxed in and hidden away. As a result it all looks neat and clean but is a total nightmare if anything needs fixing! The flush mechanism on the toilet in the main bathroom stopped working properly. It still flushed but only if you lifted the lid of the cistern and pulled the mechanism by hand – thankfully in this particular case the cistern itself hadn’t been boxed in and tiled! I bought a new flush mechanism and double checked how to fit it. It should be a simple 10 minute job: detach cistern, unscrew old flush mechanism, replace with new; repeat with the push button, refit cistern; easy! Of course in real life that wasn’t the case. Detaching the cistern involves unscrewing two bolts, fastened underneath the back of the toilet with wing nuts. And in our case, all neatly boxed in with MDF then tiled over!! First we had to scrape out the grout from between the tiles and prise one off the top of the box. Then get a drywall saw and hack away a chunk of the MDF so that it was possible to get a hand underneath the left side of the toilet (as you face it). On the right there was already a small gap with part of a tile cut away. Perhaps they made it this way or else somebody had the same problem before (I suspect the latter). Even after this there was only just enough space to get two or three fingers inside to undo the wing nuts. Well my partner and I managed to do that between us, without too much cursing, and also unscrew it from the wall. Then I was able to undo the water pipe and lift off the cistern, then remove the old mechanism and replace it – that only took a few minutes. But putting it back – that was a whole other story! This is getting far too long… I think there will have to be a part 2!