One of the joys (is there a sarcasm tag??) of owing a house is that one gets to do all those fun home repairs: gutter cleaning, raking autumn leaves, caulking and so on.

But there is one bucket of home repair that, to me, is a special hell: Bathroom or plumbing repairs (often a two-fer!).

Finished up a bathroom repair an hour or so ago, and it seems pretty straightforward: Replace a toilet seat.

Trivial – remove the nuts from the two screws, install new seat and tighten bolts.

But this house is always an adventure when it comes to repairs. I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve had a repair person out and they said something in the vein of, “Huh! I’ve never seen that done that way before!” Which is exactly what you want to hear when you’re getting charged $XX an hour and you need, say, heat or hot water.

Anyway, the issue here was the bolts holding the seat to the toilet. Plastic nuts with 1/4-inch top flange, and about an inch or so plastic sleeve as part of the nut.

OK…

But it was on a bare metal – not brass, zinc- or brass-plated metal, or plastic – bolt.

And the plastic had, over the years, essentially fused to the bolt.

And with the toilet tucked close to the wall on one side, tough to access/see/remove the one bolt.

Basically, I had to remove the sleeve a little at a time, like picking at a scab on your knee when you were a kid. And then destroy/remove flange (which actually prevented the seat from being removed).

Slow, painful, awkward.

The “easy” bolt probably took three hours (total) to remove; the tough one took roughly double that. And the area around the toilet was strewn with just about every tool I own in an attempt to coax the plastic off the metal.

Just to replace a frickin’ toilet seat!

Ah, the joys of home ownership.

At the same time, a sense of accomplishment…progress, however incremental!