Life span of the average toilet?

At Swede Farm the life span of the average toilet is one year. If you buy the cheapest toilet-in-a-box at the closest box store that works out to being approximately twenty cents a day. I guess that isn't bad for something not intended to be a consumable item. An argument could likely be made for buying a more expensive toilet with the idea that it might last longer but that is really hard to bring ourselves to do when who knows when the next blow will come.

We have always had toilet challenges. I seem to recall a comb being flushed earlier in our marriage that caused a fair bit of trouble. The attacks have been far more frequent and severe as the number of children have increased. Number one on the frequency list are items flushed that are not intended to be flushed that subsequently wedge themselves in so tightly that they cannot be removed. Horses of the plastic variety, hair clips, toothbrushes. The bar of soap was a fun one, if the bubbles would have only gone down we would have had a self-cleaning toilet, a very nice smelling self cleaning toilet, as it was a bar of Katie's hand-crafted lavender soap!

Second most common is the tank lid being broken. Usually this means it is dropped and breaks into a multitude of pieces at one time. Recently we had the experience of a toilet tank lid breaking slowly over time. First one corner broke off. Then another corner. Then it developed a crack across a third corner. It looked for all the world as if someone was coming in at night and taking big bites of the toilet tank lid! Yumm-o!

The oddest reason that we ever had to replace a toilet actually had nothing to do with the children, it had more to do, I guess, with living in the country.

A mouse moved into the toilet. And couldn't leave.

We heard a blood-curdling scream from the bathroom one day from one of our older daughters. They had happened to look into the toilet and saw a mouse tail moving rapidly around the inside of the bowl. Apparently a mouse (I am guessing a small one) managed to maneuver itself into the part of the toilet inside the bowl up under the rim where the water comes out when you flush and got stuck. So he ran around and around in circles but never left. We couldn't extricate him. (Lots of playing rock, paper, scissors went into deciding who would get that job!) We decided to allow him the privacy to get himself out of this dicey situation and quietly left and closed the door behind us. A day later he was still there. We finally asked any and everyone who we thought might have input on mice in toilets and were told that due to the design of the toilet it was probable that he was in there for life. (I guess it could have been a she mouse but in my experience it is a particularly male thing to be so enamored of this particular piece of equipment.) This left us with two solutions. We could let the mouse live out the rest of it's life in the toilet, sort of like an odd garden gnome, or we could replace the toilet. We replaced the toilet. More rock, paper, scissors to determine who got to hug the ceramic mouse trap and we moved on with life. Not so for the mouse.

Latest was the toilet turned bidet. Emma came to see me one afternoon saying "mom there is something wrong with your toilet, when I flush it water goes everywhere!" In typical ADD fashion my response was something between "mmmhmmm" and "why were you using my bathroom?" Later that same day I went to use the same toilet and discovered that for once in her life Emma had understated the situation. Water didn't "go" everywhere, it sprayed upwards in an amazing geyser before settling down to a peaceful bubbling. I did some exploration and discovered the source of the issue of water. If you look at the average toilet, there is a small 'bridge', if you will, between the tank portion and the bowl portion. It is this area that usually is the beneficiary of male attention--or rather, inattention. It appears that this portion of the toilet came under attack by something that resembled a hammer for it had a round hole in the middle of this "bridge". When the toilet was flushed, the water that normally flowed through this channel was instead propelled through the hole in an arc of amazing velocity. Duct tape was tried as a stop-gap repair but it appears that toilets are one thing that duct tape does not fix. At any rate, the toilet is now replaced. One good thing about having had so many toilet issues is that pretty much anyone in the house knows how to remove and replace toilets.

And that is an essential life skill, right?