February 14: Miniatures Painting, Editing, New Toilet

I've done some miniatures-painting every day for the last five in a row, woo. Other than the long session on Saturday, it's been an hour to ninety minutes or so a day. The idea is to be consistent and keep plugging away at it. I've been doing my usual morning routine of breakfast and dinking around, then instead of getting up to go to Pretend Coffee Shop, I get up and paint miniatures. This works fairly well for getting me moving, because motivating myself to write or edit is often much harder than painting miniatures, which requires more fiddliness and patience than creative energy. 

Since tomorrow's a work day, I will break my miniature-painting streak then. It's pretty hard to get me moving to do anything other than take a nap after work. I might get an Apothecaria illustration done or an entry written during Coffee Quills's stream, but not likely to do much else.

After painting today, I sat down at Pretend Coffee Shop and went "ugh I don't want to finish this Apothecaria illustration" and remembered that I could edit A Dragonling's Family so I did that.

I've done a chunk of editing A Dragonling's Family recently because it became the path of least creative resistance. It's funny because I'll get to the end of the day and be like "oh no I only illustrated one Apothecaria today, what did I do all day???" And have to remind myself, repeatedly, that I editing Dragonling and also that Dragonling is my actual creative priority for the month so this is a good thing.

Today, I unexpectedly finished several editing points by them turning out to be much easier than I had anticipated. It was early afternoon and I played a little Time Princess to celebrate. Then I went "I got an extra 10%-15% done on Dragonling already today, so I could do something else! What else do I want to do?"

And then I remembered that I still had to install the toilet.

...

okay fine I will install the toilet.

I unboxed all the bits and dragged out the instructions and installed the app on my phone.

Yes, my new toilet came with a download link for an app. The app turned out to be a general "how to install various things" app, and not specific to the toilet. 

After searching for my specific toilet in the app, it brought up a list of tools: putty knife, level, towel, adjustable wrench (optional), adjustable pliers (optional). I searched the house and located a sort of right-angle putty knife that I figured was close enough, a shop towel, and adjustable pliers. I could not find a level or an adjustable wrench, though I feel like we ought to have both. (Lut doesn't think we ever had an adjustable wrench, though. We used to have a socket wrench set but it might've been kept in the garage and stolen.)

I took inventory of the parts for the toilet and everything was there, plus two metal washers that weren't on the list of parts. I started the installation instructions themselves. The app broke the process down into 28 steps, with each step being very simple. It'd play a narrated video clip of the step and then wait for you to push continue before proceeding to the next clip. The process looked as straightforward as I remembered.

At no point did the instructions explain where to use a level, or what to do if the thing to be leveled wasn't level. 

I decided to proceed without buying a level or a normal putty knife. I shut off the water to the whole house because I didn't see a shutoff valve on the toilet. Then I disconnected the water line to the tank and saw where the shutoff valve was attached at its base -- it was just much smaller than I'd expected. Oh well. Moving on!

The instructions said to clear the water from the toilet by flushing. This mostly-emptied the tank but not the bowl. I bailed out the bowl after a while, made an unsuccessful effort to mop out the tank with the towel, and finally just wrangled the old toilet upside down into the shower to drain.

The next significant difficulty was that there was no washer underneath the nut for the right bolt that held the toilet to the floor. The nut was almost the same size as the hole the bolt goes through, and was partly inset into it, making it very hard to turn. Especially using adjustable pliers because I didn't have a wrench. I got it to turn a few times but it didn't seem to be rising. I verified that I was turning it the right direction, tried again, and concluded that the toilet was lifting away from the floor when I loosened the nut, so the bolt hole kept swallowing the nut again. I had Lut come in and sit on the toilet. This worked SO MUCH better.

When I got to the left bolt, I realized what had happened to the washer. It's not that the bolt and nut had been installed without one: it's that the washer was plastic and had literally disintegrated on the right side. On the left side, it was only partially disintegrated. I think the problem is that for some unknown reason my last toilet came with these 4 inch bolts and so the bolt covers didn't fit over them. So we'd just left them off. So the plastic washer had been exposed to all the damp/dust/dirt/grease etc. of the bathroom for the last however many years, instead of being at least somewhat protected by the cover.

I did the next several steps and then got to the actual "put the new toilet in place" step. As mentioned last entry, the new toilet weighs 80 or 90 pounds. I can lift it, with some difficulty. Lining it up with two bolts while lifting it was...debatable. I had Lut come in and spot for me on whether it was lined up correctly, and then shoved it to the right area. As it turned out, I could kind of tilt it on its front and then lower the back down onto the bolts instead of holding the whole thing off the floor. Still annoying but much easier. Got it lined up with Lut's help and then lowered it.

The steps dealing with new toilet were generally much easier than the steps dealing with the old toilet, because all the bits were there and clean and where they were supposed to be.

The only problem with the toilet is the same problem we've had with previous toilets: the floor isn't very level so the toilet wobbles. My friend who installed the last toilet fixed this by shimming it within an inch of its life. I tried to imitate this using the shims from the previous toilet, but did not succeed. I figure I'll call my friend and ask his advice. And probably buy some new shims.

In any case: the toilet is installed! It works! I spent about 2.5 hours on the project, of which ninety minutes were "actually installing" and the other hour was going through the instructions beforehand and gathering tools and cleaning up afterwards. I was exhausted afterwards and am totally calling this my exercise for today.

I don't know for sure how much it would've cost to install the toilet. The only place that offered an online quote was a store we didn't buy from. I think it was something like $50 to have the toilet delivered in a box to my house, another $50 to have the toilet box carried into the bathroom (without installing it), and then another $250 to have it installed. Doing all of these steps myself was annoying but definitely worth $350 to me. Now I get to spend $350 on something frivolous and unnecessary!

But I still haven't finished that Apothecaria illustration so I should do that now.