Just when I thought it was safe...

to go to the bathroom...

If you've been around Taking It On for awhile then you are familiar with my nemesis... the Low-flow Toilet.  We rent or we'd change those suckers out in a heartbeat.

There are three toilets in this house.  They all clog at least once a day.  Two of them super suck and one is The Good Toilet... where we go if we can make it when real business is at hand.  Know what I mean?  Not only do they all require multiple flushes per "go" and at least one sound daily plunging, but two of them were also constantly very slightly running due to bad seals in the tank.  One of these perpetually running commodes is The Good Toilet.  

We had the property manager's o-so-handyman come take a look at this issue.  This guy is the face of not-the-sharpest-tool-in-the-shed.  

His name is Brruuuuce.

And he is the farthest thing from a Great White you could imagine... 

he actually reminds me a lot of a Sea Monkey.

So Brruuuuce comes to fix the toilets... not the flush-power part but the running part.  He replaces the flaps inside the tanks.  But he puts in a faulty flap on The Good Toilet... thereby rendering it no longer The Good Toilet.  The faulty flap now gets stuck every. single. time. you flush. Everytime.  It never doesn't get stuck.  So not only are you needing to flush at every stage of evacuation, but at every flush you need to remove the top of the tank and fish around to make the flap cover the seal.  Nice.  

Well, I fear I am losing the Toilet War.  The Good Toilet upped the ante today in the War of the Flush...

After my invigorating and cleansing ;-) run today (woo hoo... I got to go running in the day!)  I ran upstairs to  the commode-formerly-known-as-The-Good-Toilet (and you know why).  I did my "post-op", "prelim" flush and carefully poised myself as I removed the tank lid to fix that flap.  I completed my mission, flushed and left.

I was puttering around on the computer when the smoke detector went off.  I am generally not surprised by the smoke detector going off... given my track record in the kitchen you would understand this.  My husband hollered out... "BABE....?"  as if it were again one of my culinary mishaps.  I ran downstairs, bewildered as to what I had left on.  Was I really losing it that badly that I couldn't even remember if/what/when I had been cooking?

I got to the bottom of the stairs and was greeted by not only a blaring smoke detector, but an indoor shower!  Water was pouring out of the smoke detector!  Isn't that weird?

I shouted out an expletive (the "s" word... and not 'stupid' or 'shut up') and ran to the kitchen just to make sure we weren't dealing with two issues... we weren't (so at least I wasn't losing my mind).  And then ran back upstairs to grab a towel to wipe up the water pouring out all over the hall floor whereupon I saw the totally flooded bathroom!

The flap had gotten stuck AND my final flush had proved to be a latent clogger.  *expletive*  And that perpetually running water was just flowing over the edge of the toilet bowl.  FLOWING.  A quick flip of the flap put a stop to that, and 14 beach towels were enough to sop up the water which, miraculously, didn't get any of the carpeting wet upstairs or down.  Three big plastic buckets caught most of the water that was pouring not only through the smoke detector but also through a recessed lighting fixture next to it as well as a weird little pinhole in the garage.  No real damage.  Whew.  But what an ordeal.  These toilets totally have it in for me.  I think they are part of a Stephen King novel.

So the story gets better...

Remember I've used ALL the towels cleaning up this toilet fiasco.

At one o'clock in the morning (of course) my 5-year old comes into my room... "mommy... I just threw up in my bed..."  So I go in to clean it up and clean him up and assess what more is needed.  I send him into the bathroom to wash his hands and take off his shirt and direct him to puke in the toilet, should he have the urge again.  He goes into the bathroom and vomits all over the floor, the vanity, the step stool, the door...  We have no junky towels to clean this up!  They are all in the wash and soaking wet!  So I start mopping up chunks with the "good" towels (which are actually pretty ancient and frayed anyway).  My husband comes in and takes over the cleaning of the inanimate objects while I tend to Q-man.

I am getting him situated in a clean bed with a giant bowl beside it when Baby X starts moaning.  I go in.  She joins in the fun.  Poor girl.  Thankfully we had braided her hair before she went to bed!

By two o'clock, all is quiet ... except Big G who is yelling at us to keep it down because he is trying to sleep.  Then all is quiet for real.

Today I am doing lots of laundry and changing videos and buckets for sick kids.

And wishing I had a portapotty in my backyard.

Indoor plumbing is overrated.