Adventures in Plumbing, Part 2

Both of our toilets are nearly fifty years old.

Normally, that would explain a lot.  After all, we've been having trouble with these toilets for awhile now and our attempt to get new guts for one of them was not met with success.   So, we had been looking around for new toilets.  But the enterprising Missus started doing research last night and we discovered something amazing.  This toilet:

(Yes, this toilet.)  Is going for upward of $500 on eBay.  Lids to these toilets are going for around $200.  For some weird reason, we seemed to have been sitting on solid vintage toilets of some kind and here's the mystery of it all:  I can't for the life of me figure out why.

Our toilets are Eljer toilets.   Eljer is a company that's still around today from what I can tell and I haven't been able to find any super-secret menus/news that their toilets are prized collectors items suddenly.  There's not a whole heck of a lot to really endear you to these toilets.   Their parts are so old that they're out of date and thus can't be fixed with parts from your local Menard's, Lowe's, etc.    And they use a hefty amount of water:  since The Cigarillo has discovered the Big Potty, our water bill has taken a large jump upward as you might expect, given his insistence on getting off the potty, checking the potty to see what the turd and/or pee he deposited there might look like, and then flushing them one at a time.

If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that these toilets are popular because they predate people giving a shit about things like water consumption and energy efficiency and like the people that stocked up on incandescent lightbulbs before they went the way of the dinosaur, I'm sure there are people that prefer old fashioned, water wasting toilets instead of the new fangled energy efficient, low flush things of today.   Or maybe it's just something about Eljer toilets.  Damned if I know...  to me, a shitter is a shitter but what do I know?

Today though, we went out to Lowe's, settled on the bold lock of Kohler (an Elliston, for those eccentrics reading this that really dig their shitters) and it gets installed on Thursday.   Given how old our toilets are, I'm sort of nervous about what surprises might lurk beneath these vintage bad boys.  But once they have it out we are going to take out to the Salvage Barn to see if anyone wants to take a crack at restoring this bad boy.

The adventures...  continue.