First of all, YAY! I have a renter. He moves in on Sunday. God, I can't believe it will be May already.
Before he moves in, I have to fix the toilet. I had turned the water off downstairs because there was a leak in the basement. Originally I thought a pipe had frozen during the winter (and I wasn't looking forward to figuring out where the leak was). Upon closer inspection, though, I realized that the leak was actually in the intake pipe for the toilet, and was just dripping down the water pipe into the cellar. I didn't know if the fill assembly was also leaking, so I bought a replacement assembly just in case. Total for that and the intake pipe: $11.
This afternoon I took a break from my buglist and replaced the intake pipe. That fixed the leak, so now I have an extra fill assembly hanging around. Given the extremely yucky state of the current float in that toilet, maybe I should just replace it.
As I was getting friendly with the toilet, I noticed that I could still hear a trickle of water and, sure enough, every 30 seconds or so the toilet would fill again. Great. So I pulled out my official Toilet Flapper Tester (long-handled pasta scoop utensil), and pushed the handle down hard on top of the flapper. No more trickle out of the tank. Of course, a new flapper was the one thing I didn't buy when I was at the hardware store today....arrrrrrrgh.
Now we come to the important part of this post, which is a new law that I have decided to name after my dad, a fabulous Mr. Fix-it:
Bruce's Law:
The replacement part you need will be the one part you didn't buy.
Well, I did get half the repair done so at least I'm closer now. And fortunately it only took about 5 minutes. Woohoo.