In which I Talk Yet More About The Potty

I know, you are like: "Enough already, woman, we are done hearing about the bathroom" or if you are a New Yorker if may sound more like "bat-room". Also, it involves Craigslist and you know I haven't talked much about Craigslist here on this here blog. Right.

Seeing as my house is 22 years old, things in it tend to go tits up right around now (plumbing, dishwasher, master closet railings, etc). Note to anyone looking at 80s houses - expect stuff to stop working on somewhat of a frequent basis. The latest is the guest bathroom upstairs. The in-laws were here and used said bathroom on a daily basis. Around day 2, the toilet sprung a leak where the tank and the bowl connect. I was reassured that it only leaked when flushed as if this was no big deal. So as long as we don't plan to use the toilet, it's fine. Considering we seem to have an overnight guest at least once a month, it didn't seem like a viable route to just not flush it. Rather than fix an old-ass toilet that likely uses more than 3 gallons per flush, we figured might as well replace her with a water-efficient model. They run about $100 for a 1.28 gpf model, so, not a huge deal.

Here is where Craigslist comes in. I really had no expectation of finding a toilet on Craigslist, I mean, seriously, even if it was water conserving, the idea of buying someone else's USED toilet crossed my boundaries of frugality. Though, when you buy a house that isn't new, you are technically buying the seller's used toilets. Just a thought. Anyway, back to Craigslist. For shits and giggles, I searched "toilet" in the "materials" section and up popped a posting about new 1.28 gpf toilets for $50. New-in-box, complete toilets. It's like the Craigslist Magic Fairies decided I needed a good deal on poopers. Turns out, this woman was stuck with boxes and boxes (at one point 226 of them) of new toilets in her front-yard that had essentially been abandoned. Her story was that as a favor she agreed to store them (I guess it was someone she knew or some company of someone she knew, I didn't quite understand the situation entirely) since the job wasn't ready to install them yet. It sounded like it may have been a retrofit scenario when the state was giving away high efficiency toilets to certain building owners/administrators (like multi-family apartment buildings) so the old hogs could be swapped out, thus saving the owners water-bill money and also helping out our drought situation. 226 toilets in her front yard. That must have been a sight. Anyway, after she tried to contact the owners of the toilets for several months without response, she sent a final letter informing them she is considering it abandoned property and started selling them. Because how long can you live with that many boxes of toilets hanging out in your front yard.

So, for the price of one new toilet at the home improvement store, I got two. I figured, grab 'em now and just replace the master bath toilet as well. She was down to about 8 boxes when I got them so I guess I timed it pretty well. Still haven't found a weedwacker, though. I like how Girly Stuff referenced her husband as her weedwacker. Mine is too, except, we have a big slope in our yard - not sure how far back it goes but it's at least 20 feet high at the top. It's full of dead overgrown (2+ feet high) weeds from winter rains. It's damn near impossible to manually pull them up so he needs to use a power garden tool. Our old one decided to stop turning on about half-way through the job of clearing out the whole slope. I guess it had enough wacking.