I’m hoping to make Fix-It Friday a semi-regular feature, being that I’m involved in a lot of do-it-yourself projects around our house. Actually, I’m involved in them all, and I love it. Except when things break.
Like our toilet seat, which cracked under the pressure sometime over the weekend. I noticed it on Sunday afternoon, and who knows when the fracture originally occurred.
I’m not going to lie: Breaking a toilet seat can give you a weight complex. Luckily, hubby and I both have BMIs in the normal range!
For the time being, I temporarily remedied the problem using that old MacGuyver (no, not MacGruber, SNL lovers) standby: Duct tape!
I then forgot about the problem for a few days, until Wednesday, when I ran to Home Depot on my lunch hour and picked up a brand-new seat — and more importantly, it was a MATCHING seat. As you’ve no doubt already noticed, this broken seat? Not white, like the rest of the fixture. Oh, no. Somehow, a cream or peach seat wound up on here. And from what I’ve learned about how some things in this house were pieced together, it should be of no surprise. The old man probably found it at a garage sale, or salvaged it off a street curb. Now that I think about it, I should have just changed the seat immediately when we moved in. Ew.
I’d never put a new toilet seat on before, but believe me, this is a cinch. All you have to do is unscrew the plastic nut at the bottom of the hinges. Yeah, you’ve got to get down and dirty to look underneath and see the area where the nut is. Lefty-loosey that thing off on one side, then repeat on the other. Once off, you can easily pull the old seat right off the fixture.
This is a GREAT time to clean the area where the hinges were. It’s pretty damned icky under there. I recommend a cleaner with bleach.
Open up the package with the new toilet seat in it. You’ll have a hinged seat, two wide screws and two wing nuts (both are generally made of plastic). Some plastic-hinged seats have a little flap to hide the hole that the screw goes into, so gently pry that open with a coin, flathead screwdriver or your fingertip. Then position the new seat so that the holes in the hinges match up with the holes in the fixture.
Insert a screw through the holes, put the wing nut on the end of the screw (yes, stick your head back into that gross area underneath again), and hand-tighten. Use a flathead screwdriver to hold the top of the screw from turning and tighten the wing nut one more time to be sure it won’t get loose (it will, eventually — just tighten the nut again when needed).
Toss the old seat away, wipe down the new seat, and you’re back in business to do, uh, your business! Here’s the finished product:
Hope this mini-tutorial was helpful. Next time I need to do a repair or a DIY project, hopefully I’ll remember to take step-by-step pictures.
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[…] occasional series that details the projects I’ve done around the house. Check out some past posts here and […]
[…] series that details the projects I’ve done around the house. Check out some past posts here and […]