EVEN IN A PANDEMIC - THINGS BREAK AND NEED TO BE REPLACED

 The time had come – we had to replace one of our toilet seats – the one in the upstairs bathroom.  We have been in the house for about 33 years.  We have 2 bathrooms and have replaced each of the toilet seats at least once.  The upstairs toilet seat apparently had a plastic film seal over the seat and the hole that had suddenly appeared in the film was getting too big to ignore, so a new one was needed.  (I am a big believer in “whenever you can ignore a problem – do so”.)  I had not actually completely ignored the problem  - I had given a bit of a pull to the edge of the hole to see if it would expand...

Now a toilet seat might seem a generic item and replaceable with no thought, but having grown up in a home where the bathroom was alternatively referred to as “the reading room” and “daddy's office”, I can assure you it does take some thought – especially when one is on a budget.  First I read up on toilet seats as I knew that these days there are different shapes and though there might even be different sizes – only different shapes.  I was pretty sure ours was a “round” as opposed to an “elongated” - the latter being a newer style of toilet than ours – which predates our buying the house.  I was right.  So size was determined – round.  Price is always a factor and we did not something fancy – so next question was plastic or (not, not paper) wood?  We have one of each (our half bath in our kitchen* has a wood seat).  Husband studied the seats in both bathrooms and decided on plastic.

Then the hard question – Home Depot or Lowes?  I noticed that Home Depot had a lot more choices than Lowes, but husband had to go to both stores.  He bought the plastic, round seat, near, but not at the bottom of the price range, we had figured would be good for us and we took it home.  

At home  - after it sat around for a few days, of course, he opened the box and took the seat to the bathroom to see how it would be.  He then went to the Home Depot website and decided that maybe we should have a more substantial seat and found one.  Back to Home Depot and bought that seat.  We had not returned the original so we could think about it.  

He decided the new one was more substantial and decided to put it in.  It was another manufacturer and had a more complicated installation than the other (and our old) seat – involving putting in the hinge and then pushing the seat connectors into the hinge.  When he took the seat out of the box it had several large scratches on it.  Back to thinking.  One thing he mentioned that was that the scratched one was slightly, but measurably thicker - “Does that matter?”  My first response was “no”, but then I thought about it.  This toilet is somehow taller than the one downstairs (which should be the same size) and the downstairs one is a slightly more comfortable height for me  so I changed my response to “yes” and explained this to him.  We decided to go with the first seat.  

We went to install the first seat we bought.  We took off the old one – cleaned the toilet well (my job) and went to install the new seat.  Unfortunately no one thought that one have the toilet sitting almost against the side wall.  (I often joke that we should take out the toilet paper and find someplace else to put it so my leg does not touch it when using the toilet – it is that close a space.)  Installing the left side of the seat was complicated by this problem, but we managed to get installed.  Well, that's something accomplished.  

The seat does have a new feature – s l o w  c l o s i n g.  I am used to holding the end of the seat to keep it from falling too quickly and have to learn to let go and let it fall.