Vacation - Day 2

Day two wasn’t nearly as productive as Day 1.

I spent most of yesterday between projects, contemplating (or procrastinating?) what to do next. In-between these long periods of silence I had several short bursts of efficiency, primarily finishing up some framing details in the kitchen. Both the baking area and the breakfast nook now have their lowered ceilings framed in, and the back wall of the bathroom is framed in.

One of the items I spent time contemplating about is the toilet for our half bath. Everything was going well with the half bath until we chose a toilet. I had figured that a 10” rough-in (the space from the wall to the drain) would be just fine – there are plenty of toilets designed for a 10” rough-in. Of course the toilet we like, the Toto Aquia, only comes in a 12” rough-in model. It’s all very confusing because most of the Toto-brand toilets are compatible with an adapter that makes a 12” model work with a 10” rough-in, or vice versa. This is a new model toilet and there’s no information on the entire Internet about it being compatible with the adapter. So, it looks as if I’ll have to rework the drain so that it’s another two inches out from the wall.

The other issue is that this toilet doesn’t install like a traditional toilet. Traditional toilets are secured to the floor using two bolts that are secured to the flange, which is screwed to the floor. It appears that this toilet, like other Toto toilets, has additional bolts that screw into the floor. This presents a problem because of the decision I made to route all of our radiant floor tubing through the bathroom floor to the manifold which sits behind the toilet. From what I can tell, two of the bolts would go directly through one of my tubes. I’m starting to think that running the tubes so close to the toilet wasn’t such a great idea.

Of course, while other Toto brand toilets have installation instructions available on the website, this one doesn’t. Blah.

We have a couple of choices. 1) Buy the toilet and figure out how to install it without interfering with the radiant tubing. 2) Choose a different toilet.

It seems like an obvious choice (#2, right?). But here’s the thing – I’m really gung ho about this toilet. It’s a dual-flush toilet which means that yellow stuff goes down with .9 gallons of water, and the brown stuff goes down with 1.6 gallons. That figures to something like a 20% water savings, which is cool. There are only a few of these dual flush jobs on the market (at least, in the U.S., they’re ubiquitous in Europe and elsewhere…) and we didn’t really like the other brands.

Thinking about the toilet got me thinking about the sink. We need a SMALL sink, because this is a SMALL bathroom. I started searching the Internet and came up with a few that will work, but the one I like the most I found this morning (officially on Day 3…). The only problem with this one is that it costs $2800, and that certainly will NOT work.

Note that it’s made out of wood. I’m thinking I could make one of these…