Hot Shower and Tall Toilet

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I flat out lied yesterday morning.  No blog post ever happened because it was one hell of a weird day.  First off I did not sleep hardly at all Sunday night.  I am not sure what was up but I spent most of my night tossing and turning and staring at the clock as it kept ticking up towards our 5:30 wake up time.  Then Kenzie our oft times asshole cat woke us up around 5… because apparently she was afraid we would over sleep?  I took Monday and Tuesday off this week to combine it with Wednesday that we were getting for the 4th of July.  This has given me a five day weekend… and it has been glorious.  Now when I originally took the time off it was as the suggestion of my boss… given that it was shaping up that I was going to be the only manager in the office Thursday and Friday.

There was nothing really planned at all, but my wife decided to take this opportunity for me being off to schedule a bunch of things that otherwise needed to happen.  So as it went yesterday we had an appointment at 8 am, 10 am and 11 am…  originally just to give estimates but some scope creep happened.  Some time ago… around the 13th of February we had an issue where we had NO hot water at all.  You can read that post if you want more details but the long and short of it is…  our Hot Water Heater had a manufacture date of 1977…  making it one year younger than me.  Hot Water Heaters are in theory not supposed to last forty years… and as a result ours was full of a sediment made largely of calcium deposits that were getting sucked up with the hot water and clogging all of our delivery points.

So we knew at some point we would need to get all of that fixed but the estimate our Air Conditioning company that also does plumbing gave us…  was pretty painful.  They laid out three options for us and all of them involved a certain amount of work to “bring it up to code” which in truth is something we just had to take them at their word.  Back in February we managed to remove the clog from the shower which restored functionality and allowed us to kick the hot water heater replacement down the road a bit.  So yesterday we had intended to get a second estimate from a local business, and instead had a bit of scope creep.

Home ownership is largely a long string of things that annoy you about your house.  One of these was the fact that in our main downstairs bathroom we had a shorter than normal toilet.  You have to understand that I am 6’4″ and a good deal of that height is in my legs… making less than comfortable to use said toilet over the last almost twenty years.  The other problem is that toilet never really flushed amazingly well and took 15 minutes for the huge tank to fill between uses.  However like so many things with a home… you just sorta live with it until you reach a critical break point.  While we were dealing with the hot water heater we asked for an estimate to get that replaced with a taller toilet… and apparently what I was really wanting was an ADA compliant toilet which is roughly 18 inches tall instead of the 15 we currently had.

Essentially the estimate we got for the hot water heater and the toilet…  installed and ready to go was less than the lowest estimate we got from before.  The guy had time to do it yesterday so we went ahead and made it happen…  and now I have the toilet I have always wanted.  It is going to take some getting used to given this feels a lot taller than our previous one…  and the fact that the person who flipped our home did not remove the tank to the toilet and just painted around the old one… meaning we have some ancient wallpaper now showing.  That will be handled during a future frantic weekend but for the moment I am supremely happy… and given that at the last minute I had to dip into my birthday money because the amount the guy told us to pull out of the bank was a little off…  we are calling this my birthday present instead of our anniversary gift.

I am guessing we will call the Hot Water Heater the Anniversary gift and my god… the shower was glorious this morning.  I guess I did not realize how far gone the 40 year old one was… because we have been taking showers for some time with the knob all of the way to the hot side.  I damned near burned myself this morning because the new unit works significantly better.  The water pressure though… that is the big difference and while I had to take the shower head off and fish out some bits of calcification with tweezers…  once reassembled the end result was phenomenal.  It really is the little things that make you happy in life.

This has been an insane weekend of doing stuff…  that saw us disposing of a bunch of things that had been sitting around taking up space including the 250 lb HP Laserjet 5si office printer that we were originally trying to find a good home for.  We now know what it is going to take to remodel the bathroom as well so we can start planning accordingly.  We’ve spent much of the extended weekend talking about all of the things we can do that are just cosmetic that will improve our opinion of rooms like the kitchen.  Unfortunately this has meant not a ton of gaming, but if I have to sacrifice of that to use the bathroom comfortably and have a hot shower…  then it seems like a perfectly acceptable sacrifice for now.

4 thoughts on “Hot Shower and Tall Toilet”

  1. We’re getting closer and closer to possibly finally being able to build a house. I have been a die hard renter for my entire adult life and never thought I would want to build but I think I’m finally at that point in my life where I want the choice rather than making due with what is on offer.

    • Overall, knowing what horror stories I have heard about building new, compared to buying older homes with “character” (code for get out your wallet for fixing stuff), I think as long as you go in with reasonable expectations, research the builder, etc. I would have loved to build, but it wasn’t feasible 20 years ago.

  2. I put that up there with people that paint around outlet and switch plates. Now normally I will go that little extra and replace outlets and switches. Because even those need changing every so often. Not when they start smoking.

    Yeah I learned about the water tank warning signs. That gunk in the kitchen faucet or washing machine is the first sign. It is worth getting it fixed. The repercussions of letting it go are worse, new washing machine, new dishwasher, changing faucets. It all adds up. About 7 years ago we decided to scrap the oil heater for gas. Now gas vents out the side of the house, and we were told that the hot water tank we had, that we had replaced 5 years prior, would not generate enough heat to keep the mortar in the chimney dry and our option would be to get the chimney lined, $4000, or get an on demand hot water for $2500. I guess you know which way we went, then we found out the gas line to the house was from the 1930’s and was corroded inside and we would not have enough gas pressure to run the stove or dryer when the heater was running, let alone the hot water. Fortunately the gas company had a rebate program running and we got a new huge line feeding the house and meter for $100. Long story short, when I started 2 months ago doing the kitchen remodel, I started taking down the chimney that was in a corner of the kitchen. The whole chimney was lined. The heater guy just wanted the extra work, and I didn’t know any better.

  3. What is it with people not painting behind removable things? We’re in our second house and in both the previous owners didn’t bother to paint behind toilets, thermostats, the refrigerator, etc, etc. Incredibly frustrating.

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