Rants from the Hollow

Before leaving on my trip, I had to perform one last ritual, the ceremonial unfurling of the Tannenbaum, which is a purely male task in my household. I used to think that it took a lot of effort to purchase and ‘plant’ a natural Christmas tree. I remember my dad struggling with the tree and a flimsy sheet metal holder, made out of red & green sheet metal. It had 3 screws to hold and center the tree, and he used to put pennies between the ends of the screws and the tree to keep them from just boring right thru the tree. We had a similar holder when first married, but when I found a heavy welded steel holder at a shopping mall gadget shop, I bought it, intending it to be a lifetime purchase. It still took between 30 and 120 minutes of fussing with saws, hatchets, and acetylene torches, usually in a constant downpour that was just a bit to warm to freeze, at least until it was under your collar.

Moving to Europe, and renting our dwelling, we decided that artificial would be most appropriate. I guess we’ve gotten our money’s worth out of the current tree, which I’ve just spent over an hour straightening. The tree is made from a central stalk with a bunch of brushes hanging off it from wires. Once you’ve found it in the garage, taking it out of the box (last year, we bought a special bag for it), and putting it together is about a 5 minute task. Then you start preening and straightening the branches. This is when you start wondering if a real tree wouldn’t be less work. Its a trade off between the sticky sap and pleasant smell of a real tree, and the straightening and increasingly moldy whiffy smell of the Fuller brush tree. I should borrow one of those pine tree scent gidgets that all cabbies have hanging from their rear view mirror (some are pine, many are vanilla, and a lot of them are just something abstract and stinky to compensate for the loss of tobacco privileges).

Listening to the recording of a recent NFL game, just to get me into an American mood, I started in on the lights, which is another male responsibility. Christmas lights used to be big hunky fiddly things that were so expensive you’d repair every year. Now they are delicate little fiddly things that break even more often, but aren’t worth repairing. Like the tree, they come from China, so they are probably unhealthy to eat. Light strings don’t just plug into the wall any more–they plug into a 24v wall wart. This means that you not only have to find the lights, but you also have to figure out where your son put the transformers. Even though he’s at college in the States, he still managed to hide them before leaving, using them for his Chinese-themed (again) 18th birthday party. The market seems to have standardized on a common voltage and plug, so the good news is that you don’t need the transformer that came with the light string your wife wants to use. I managed to get about 80% of the lights working on a string of incandescent bulbs, and all the lights were burning on an incredibly blue LED-based string.

I’ve just written the following email to several suppliers of plumbing equipment:

SUBJECT: My toilet doesn’t have a flat rim, resulting in broken seat hinges

I’m having difficulty finding a suitable replacement seat for a toilet marked ‘Savoy.’

After the hinges broke on several replacement toilet seats, I took a good hard look at my toilet. It turns out that the rim is not flat, which means that all of the weight of the occupant is falling on the front two bumpers, and the hinges. There is ¼” of space between the bottom of the back bumpers, and the toilet rim.

No wonder the hinges keep breaking-they are not meant to be weight bearing.

Is my toilet defective, or is there some sort of special curved seat that I need to buy (comfort factor?). What do you recommend I do, replace the toilet, find a special seat, or is there a high-adjusting hinge?

Thank you, Jay Heiser

I don’t think that we are especially hard on our toilet seats, but we have been replacing them at an unacceptably high rate.

I need to explain that toilet seats, like so much else in England, are special here. Apparently, nobody established a single standard for the width between the hole centers where the seats mount. The solution, at least whatever you can buy at a DIY store, the local ironmonger or online, is a one-size fits all seat that is very fiddly. The need to accommodate variations in mounting hole centers necessitates a kludgey adjustable design for the hinge flanges. As can be seen in this site, replacing a toilet seat in this country is not a routine matter: http://www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk/FITTING_A_TOILET_SEAT.htm

As shown on this photo (after the first couple broken seats, I began saving the parts for future use), The hinge post is screwed into the top of the mounting flange with a simple machine screw. Loosening the screw allows the mount to rotate, changing the relative position of two holes. Its your choice which of these two mounting points you use for a threaded rod that is inserted through the toilet and tightened underneath with a nylon wing nut. This means that there are two cheap machine screw threads inside the mounting assembly to loosen up, which they do with regularity. Having already spent too much time fiddling with these in our last English house, I had already started using Loctite.

Hinge looseness is contributory, but alone, it does not explain the high failure rate of toilet seat hinges in the master bath. I originally thought it was a quality problem. The seat I bought at the DIY store broke, and we needed a quick fix for a guest, so we bought what was available at our local ironmonger. I nice husband and wife run the place, but they both gave me a nasty look when I suggested that their thin plastic £30 seat didn’t seem especially sturdy. Apparently, you aren’t meant to sit on top of the lid, because this one broke very quickly. As shown at the top of the page, Elizabeth tried to make the best of it, but we bought yet another seat before my parents arrived for Kirk’s graduation. (She heard on a radio show that an open toilet flings fecal matter a distance of one meter, so we prefer a seat with a lid).

Now that I’ve figured out the problem, and realize that any plumber or DIY store will treat me like an oaf if I try to explain it to them, I’ve decided that the only solution is, once again, Powerputty. I pulled the two rear bumpers from the toilet seat, kneaded up a couple balls of epoxy putty, stuck them onto the base of the bumpers, stuck them back onto the bottom of the toilet seat, and then pushed the seat firmly down. I fiddled with them joint between the seat and the bumpers a bit, but it is neither an aesthetic nor a hygienic masterpiece. However, in use, all 4 bumpers are now firmly resting on top of the warped toilet rim.

The English feel that American houses are horribly dangerous. Not only are they flimsily constructed from sticks of wood, but they are unhealthy, blowing hot air out of all the walls in the winter, and cold air in the summer. The English have a natural trust for thermal consistency, preferring to heat their homes in lumps, instead of centrally.

Moving into a house in England, although a rental one, I was sure that I’d have plenty of opportunity to drill more holes in the wall, and buy more tools. When Elizabeth wanted to hang an IKEA bathroom cabinet, I figured it was a great opportunity to use my hammer drill. Putting an adapter on the Continental cord so that it could fit into the overly large English socket, I was ready for some major holeage. The external walls on most English houses are a sort of breeze block or cinder block stuff–a sort of fluffy masonry. Figuring that the wall was this stuff, I decided to drill a big hole and use a toggle bolt to solidly anchor inside the wall. To make a long story short, I stuck the toggle into my hold, and it didn’t catch like I expected, so I pushed it a little farther, and the next thing I know, Elizabeth is complaining that some piece of hardware just fell down the stairway. We got out of that house.

Still not fully cognizant of the different construction of interior and exterior walls, I ran into all sorts of metal pieces and masonry when trying to rehang a heavy curtain over the sliding door. My predecessor hadn’t done a very good job of it, and I naively assumed that I could just drill a bigger hole and put in a bigger screw anchor. This is what you do when brackets periodically fall out of the wall. You drill out the hole, put in bigger anchor, and then move before your local DIY store runs out of anchors (der Dübel in Austria, although I haven’t figured out what they use them for, given the cement walls).

Making the hole bigger wasn’t an option in this case because the (apparently) thick metal flange I ran into partway through the wall meant that I couldn’t go deep enough. Stepping back and taking a closer look at the problem, I realised that the reason the middle curtain bracket was off center was not because my predecessor was unable to use a tape measure, but because he’d already given up on the optimal spot because the hole had been widened too many times.

I walked 5 minutes down the high street to Chapmans Ironmonger and threw myself on their mercy. I left with an expensive little package of Power Putty, an epoxy compound uniquely suitable for filling holes in the wall (70kg/cm2 according to Euro Std EN 1465). It isn’t just drillable, sandable, paintable, and sturdier than whatever used to be ther, its fun. I started looking for other holes, just for the sheer pleasure of filling them full of kneaded epoxy putty (hint–spit on your fingertips so that you don’t glue yourself together).

Several months later, the drapes are still firmly attached to the walls of the living room. That’s one chronic problem solved.

I wonder how well Power Putty works on toilet seats.