YouTube and a glass of wine: how to fix anything
9:30 PM, glass of red wine, YouTube ready, old toilet in place, new toilet standing by. Ready? Sip, press play, careful with hacksaw.
Friend of foe? The toilet to be replaced. Will it go easily?
The manual for the wine bottle probably doesn’t have a hacksaw listed anywhere. Hmm, the manual for the hacksaw doubtfully mentions much wine. Good, got that legal stuff out of the way.
Home from the kids’ play and determined to get another thing off of our pre-departure list. Today’s, ahem, tonight’s item? The toilet.
No, I’ve never replaced a toilet. Not a problem! I have YouTube, right? I have wine!
At this point, I should probably get some shirts printed. Maybe deep red. Hmm, would probably get into some trouble linking YouTube, wine and fixing things. OK, no T-shirts.
Wine on counter, YouTube on the floor, tool box of assorted and not-sure-any-of-them-will-help tools. Ready!
Watch a little, copy a little. This will be a piece of cake. Of course, you have to have things ready. Like the new toilet. Then when they ask for that big ring of goo, you need that. Luckily, the woman at the toilet place sold that all to me when I said I was going to do it myself. “Oh, it’s not too hard,” she said as she pranced down the stairs.
I can fix anything!
Watch a little more, copy what they do a little more. Hit pause, go back, watch again. Hey, I could do anything like this. Hmm, so they mentioned a hacksaw in the beginning of the video as tools you might need, but I missed the part when they used it. Until I couldn’t get a bolt off. I hammered at it a bit, tried with two pliers to hold one and turn the other. No luck. Aha, this is hopefully where they need the hacksaw. Lots of hacksawing. Pause, sip, sweat. Whew. Success!
The only real trouble I had was putting the new toilet onto the ring of goo. I just couldn’t see for certain that it was on the right spot. But it was a big circle fitting into a big circle, so it didn’t seem terribly like an exact science. Of course, if things were off, there were going to be some serious consequences.
Sure enough, on the first flush, there was a tiny bit of water near the side of the foundation of the toilet. Now that I had watched the video a few times, I was practically a plumber, so I took the whole thing off and disconnected it and checked and there was something askew in the right. Straightened that out and no more water. Success!
They mentioned in passing some shims to make it level, so I split up some wood for some home made shims and I think it’s pretty stable and level. I’ll leave it for a few days and see how things are working.
So, what else can I learn with YouTube?
