Home Improvement Warrior

In my continuing quest to be a real man, I'm still toiling away on the home improvement front and just recently I put another feather in my cap in that arena by installing a new toilet seat. Admittedly this isn't the most rigorous or manly of jobs, but suffice it to say that I wasn't passionately drawn to the task, and consequently it sat unattended for many months. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that it took me awhile before I even realized that it needed to be replaced.

I use the downstairs bathroom a lot and every now and then, contrary to what mom might say, I clean the toilet. It doesn't take much, just a dash of soap and a good scrub with the brush. Along with the inside, I also clean the rim of the bowl, which as anyone who lives with men can attest to, gets pretty nasty. Regular clean up helps one to avoid the massive super-gnarly mess that makes most men faint.

Several months back I began noticing that there was small piles of crud at specific places on the rim. I wasn't really up for inspecting them too closely so I just wiped them away, but they kept appearing. I realized that they were the result of the pads on the toilet seat disintegrating. I figured it wasn't such a big deal and I would just replace the pads. Well, you can imagine my surprise when I learned that you can't really replace the pads, you have to replace the whole seat. Isn't that just like everything in life? You have to buy a completely new thing rather than fix a small part of it.

Whatever be the case, I finally decided to replace the thing and headed over to Home Depot. As you can imagine, they had quite the selection of toilets and toilet seats, a fact that baffles me but shouldn't surprise me. I went into standard mode and bought one of the cheaper ones. When I got it home I put it in the bathroom and wondered in the back of my mind how long it would be before I actually put the thing in. Well, as luck would have it, that was sooner than I thought - I put it in the same day that I bought it.

Best of all, it wasn't that difficult, nor was it that disgusting. Sure, it was a little nasty because anything involving that part of the body is going to get some residues of a mysterious nature, but nothing a baby wipe and paper towel couldn't handle. If anything, the harder part was laying down on the floor to screw the seat in - you just never know what's been on the floor around a toilet.

It took about 15 minutes, and I couldn't wait to try out the new seat and break it in, though that happened soon enough and I won't burden you with the details. Part of me wonders if I should have gotten a slightly higher-end seat, but this one was so cheap that replacing it wouldn't be that awful. Wasteful, yes, but not painful. Or, I'll just get over my OCD and live with a perfectly functional toilet seat. We'll see where this line of thinking goes.

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Until then, thanks for reading, and thanks to saragoldsmith for the pic.