DIY a Stay at Home Dad can do-wax toilet seal

Our bathroom smelled funny.  Actually, it didn’t smell funny, it smelled of urine and we clean the bathroom regularly.  Have you seen the Friends episode where they’re trapped in the bathroom and Mathew Perry says to Courtney Cox, “Are you cleaning?”  That is my wife and a constant bad smell that can’t be eradicated means that Daddy Mojo better find the odor.

I’ve experienced this before and knew that the wax toilet ring was corrupted.  Unfortunately, as I knew what the problem was, I waited to fix it because I knew how to do it.  It’s my own personal ouroboros.   As we had young children coming to the house this weekend my wife started looking up wax seal replacement on the net.

Curse the net because she found dozens of articles about sewer gas being dangerous.  With her newfound greatest nemesis given a name she dispatched me to get a plumber in ASAP to fix the seal.  Tis the con of being a SAHD, a relatively easy task; but until our 17 month old can learn not to suck on the wax ring seal we’ll have to get a plumber in here.

The hardest part of putting in a new toilet seal is lifting up the toilet.  It is deceivingly heavy and quite delicate.  Before you move the toilet put something on the ground like a plastic bag so you can catch water droplets and avoid scuffing the porcelain.

Once the toilet is off of the plumbing, remove all of the old seal and clean the surface.  Let the area dry for a little bit, then put the new seal on the plumbing and place the toilet back down.  Be sure to get the toilet down in one clean drop, otherwise you’ll have to get a new seal.  That’s a very basic explanation.

While the toilet was off I was reminded of my time in Japan.  Imagine having to use this toilet.  Yeah, it’s a hole in the ground.  Where do you put your hands?  How do you balance yourself?  I thought Japan was an industrialized nation, where are the toilets?

Those are the public toilets that you’ll find in some shopping malls and subway stations.  When I lived over there I would go out of my way to western restaurants in order to avoid that leg squat in lieu of a toilet hole.  Ladies, you didn’t have it any better, your public toilets were the same.

I kind of figured it was divine retribution by the feminine set for any toilet seats that I accidently left down.  “Son, women use the bathroom different than us men”, is how my father explained it to me when I was a child.  I’m sure there were more profound words, but his basic point was to raise the seat.

When I left Japan I did have really strong calves though.

Bottom line, be thankful for your toile and installing a new wax ring seal is easy, so put on your big boy pants and do it this weekend, if it needs to be done, otherwise stay on the sofa and watch G4.  I procrastinated and it cost us $165.

As a stay at home dad I miss having the spare time to fix things.  Even though the child is my full time job, things still break or need a fix in the house.  Sometimes the repair will be something that I easily complete and other times it’s a repair that I simply should’ve paid to have it done.  Regardless, I’ll write it up here in hopes that you may be able to gauge what you can do and when you need to call in for help.  The series is called, DIY a Stay at Home Dad Can Do, but in some cases, you shouldn’t, because of difficulty, time involved or money.  All dads aren’t equal.   If you can lift toilets and lay a gasket in no time flat then bypass this series and go straight to the fart jokes, which should be in the next column.