No one wants to sit on someone else’s toilet seat, particularly if it’s one of those soft padded seats. Doesn’t make a difference how much bleach or Mr. Clean with Febreeze is used, the warm little squish it makes as you settle your buttocks down is a constant reminder that someone else’s behind has come before you. My recent move came complete with a padded toilet seat. I added a new toilet seat to the Wal-Mart list and, though it was a DEFCON 3 priority, I didn’t change it out until a few days ago.
Now, I understood that long, plastic screws fasten down through the seat and into the actual porcelain of the bowl. I’ve always considered it an inferior design as there’s no purchase for the screws, they sort of drop through the holes and hope for the best. At least that’s what I thought.
A few years ago, one of my husband’s friendshits (see previous post on the difference between friendship and friendshit) renovated our bathroom. As befits the motto I bestowed upon him after enduring many years of his repairs and hearing the horror stories of others who hired him, “crappy work doesn’t come cheap,” he made a mess of the bathroom renovation. A corner shower, the identical model that I’d had installed in another house, was obviously not plumb and a gap of 3-4 inches between the walls and base was liberally plugged with caulk. He lost ambition after installing 3 out of 4 shelves in the medicine cabinet. The sink stopper was never installed and never found in the wreckage. Couldn’t hazard a guess as to whether he didn’t know how to install it or thought we didn’t mind losing toothpaste tubes down the drain on a regular basis. All of these mistakes paled, though, next to the toilet seat.
Though he is a contractor, wiki how has this helpful post on installing a new toilet seat to avoid unpleasantness. Basically, in addition to what I believed were useless plastic screws, toilet seats come with plastic nuts. If our fearless, friendshit carpenter had installed the toilet seat properly, it wouldn’t have come loose on one side. Not loose enough to slide off, but loose enough to jump if you sat on it wrong.
Nothing more unpleasant than a loose toilet seat.
My husband, good friend that he is, cautioned us all not to jump on the toilet seat or make hasty movements. Like somehow we were responsible for the problem. And then I changed my first toilet seat.
Imagine my surprise when I unscrewed the plastic screws and couldn’t pull the seat off. I tugged, and swore, and tugged some more. Then I felt underneath.
OMG! You don’t have to settle for a moving toilet seat.
At first I thought perhaps the nuts on the bottom were new to toilet seats, the result of class action lawsuits from people falling off them. See, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. But, I knew I was once again the victim of 21st Century Roofing‘s shoddy practices. Strangely enough, when I googled the name to ensure I had it right, they had a Better Business Bureau Rating of F. Wait, that’s not strange at all. This man has left a trail of incompetence and screwed up jobs in his wake. He works damn hard for that F.
Anyhow, I installed my new wood toilet seat correctly. Bye-bye former tenant germs and no fear of knocking the seat loose if I come in for a hard landing. As far as my former toilet seat, that’s now someone else’s business.
Renee Maynes Imagineering 