I Went Down the Street and Bought Me a Toilet

Every home I have ever lived in has come with at least one toilet. On only two occasions (prior to yesterday) has a home I was living in had a new toilet installed or an old one replaced. The summer after my sixth grade year, my parents added on to our house in Indianapolis. The addition included a second bathroom, which came with a toilet. The team that built the addition installed the toilet. Years later, shortly after Ashlee and I got married, one of the toilets in our old rental home in West Nashville stopped working. The handymen sent by the house's owners were unable to fix the problem, so they left and returned with a new toilet, which they promptly installed.

I guess I never gave much thought to where toilets come from. I suppose I assumed that only construction workers and plumbers had access to new toilets. I never considered the possibility that the average homeowner could just go to the store and buy a toilet.

A couple weeks ago we learned of a crack in the tank of one of our toilets. Within a few days, the crack grew and deepened until it went all the way through the wall of the tank. (We noticed this only after enough water had escaped through the crack to flood the small bathroom and part of the adjacent hallway.) Fortunately, there are two other toilets in our house. (I always thought that three toilets in a house the size of ours was excessive. But while dealing with the cracked tank, we had to temporarily put another of our toilets out of commission, for unrelated reasons. I now understand the benefit of three toilets.)

Yesterday, we finally decided to go toilet shopping; Ashlee, Meyer, and I started at the Home Depot down the street. I figured we would choose from a handful of floor models then arrange to have our commode of choice delivered to our home at a later date. So I was surprised to find dozens of toilets in boxes just sitting on the shelves. I also learned that the tank and the bowl of a toilet are sold separately. Who knew?

Once our family had identified the toilet that best met our needs, I simply loaded a tank and a matching bowl into our shopping cart and proceeded to checkout. Minutes later we were driving home with a new toilet in the back of our vehicle. Growing up I never imagined that I would one day walk out of a store carrying a brand new toilet; but maybe new and unforeseen experiences are what growing up is all about.