Flush With Excitement

It works!

As you can see by this lovely photo, we now have a toilet. And it even works! Hooray, we're now back to a 4-bathroom house the way it was when we moved in, and we don't have to go down a flight of stairs if we're on the top floor. Better still, our guests won't have to go down a flight of stairs.

Well, unless they want to take a bath or shower. Or brush their teeth. But one thing at a time.

As I mentioned earlier, it's a wall-mounted unit that doesn't touch the floor. This is to accommodate the strangely too-high drain pipe on this floor. Anyway, the thing is rock solid and is rated to support 800 pounds, so even the most, uh, gravitationally gifted guests will be safe.

Plumbing it in was a snap, even though it came with two sets of instructions that contradicted each other. (Reminds me of the old dictum: a man with a watch always knows what time it is. A man with two is never sure.) It turns out that both sets of instructions are correct, they just get you there in different ways.

Oh, and the instructions are all translated from German. Which would be fine if they'd just given me the German instructions. I might've be able to decipher those on my own. But no, the translated ones were just... inscrutable.

The hardest part, would you believe, was putting on the toilet seat. Plumbing? No problem. Wall supports? Piece of cake. Screwing down a stupid toilet seat? Now that's tricky. In typical German fashion, the seat is held on by an elaborately complex multi-part mechanical device that's infinitely adjustable and probably works for 12 different seats, 17 different commodes, 76 foreign countries, and five space stations. That's swell, but how do I get it to work for me? Here the instructions are oddly silent. No pictures, no metric measurements, nothing. Just a big bag of parts. I finally decided that half of the parts were unnecessary (kind of like British sports cars) and made it work. Let me know if it falls off.

I say the toilet works, but actually all I know for sure is that it doesn't leak. We've done a lot of trial flushes, but haven't actually, you know, used it used it. It's all been dry runs, so to speak. Maybe someone will come visit soon. Anybody?