Flushing Away Time – A Toilet Story!

Once upon a time, my family decided our powder room¹ needed some improvements. When we bought the house, we’d noticed the hardwood floor was discolored around the base of the toilet, like there had been condensation or maybe a few overflows. The toilet itself was prone to clogging. So, we hired a contractor friend² to replace the toilet and install laminate flooring.

To save a bit of contractor time and cost, and to make sure we got what we wanted, we researched toilets. Tall vs short. Round bowl vs elongated. Various flushing mechanisms. The ability to flush buckets of golf balls. Lids that slam vs gentle-close lids. Water efficiency. We compared options and purchased a fine porcelain potty product at the local home improvement store. That way, when the project was ready, the toilet would be ready to install.

Work started on schedule. There was a small snag in the project when the plumber noted that the hardwood discoloration was not because of condensation. It turned out there was a misalignment between the existing toilet and the closet (drain) flange that the wax ring didn’t quite bridge. Yep, for some number of years, part of the flush had seeped between the hardwood and the subfloor³. No worries, though. It was nothing a replacement of some subflooring couldn’t fix.

The subfloor fix was quick and the laminate went in nicely. We had allowed time for small delays, so everything was still on schedule. All that was left was to set our new toilet and pay the bill. All the pre-planning and that shopping trip were paying off!

The standard residential toilet in the United States is built for a 12″ rough-in. The “rough-in” is the distance from the back wall to the center of the closet (drain) flange⁴. The less-common rough-in is 10″.

At this point, you’d be justified in thinking something like “I know where this is going! You bought a 12″ toilet for a 10″ rough-in. How silly!” Or maybe “Oh, you must have gotten unlucky and bought a 10″ for a 12″ rough-in. How wacky!”

Close! But wrong.

Up front, I’ll admit that I was not aware that there were multiple common rough-in distances. I didn’t even think to measure. I’m not a plumber. I truly dislike plumbing⁵. I didn’t realize that distance measurement listed on the toilet box mattered, didn’t know it was a big deal, didn’t know what I didn’t know. It’s a toilet. Plumbers are professionals. My house is new enough that it wouldn’t have a weird pre-building-code quirk going on⁶.

The rough-in was what the plumber charmingly called “a short ten”. My tape measure calls it 9.5″⁷.

The difference between 10″ and 9.5″ is enough that, had I been smart enough to measure and get a 10″ rough-in, it wouldn’t have fit anyway. So it didn’t even matter that I got a 12″.

Our careful research didn’t matter anymore. The home improvement stores near me didn’t sell anything that’d fit. But our plumber had a source. In a couple of days, we had our new toilet installed, our powder room functional again, we had returned the “wrong” toilet to the store⁸, and everyone was happy⁹. The end!

I could end this post here and it’d be a fun little anecdote. Educational, too! But let’s tease out just a little bit more wisdom, so this is more than a fun story with useful facts about toilets.

Now, I’m reasonably handy. I built a treehouse for my kids. I did a pretty substantial remodeling project at my old house: demolition¹⁰, framing, electrical, drywall¹¹, flooring¹². I have done plenty of light plumbing tasks (though, as I mentioned earlier, I truly dislike plumbing). I’m good at figuring things out. My wife’s pretty smart too. We had a good plan to save time and had selected a pretty premium potty product.

How hard can it be to pick out a toilet?

There are a lot of things that don’t seem like they’d be that hard. Some of them really aren’t hard at all. Some of them aren’t hard in the general case, but have specifics that are difficult¹³. Some of them don’t seem hard but are nuanced and layered and really are that hard¹⁴. And when things really are that hard, there can be a cost to picking wrong¹⁵. The cost of picking wrong can sometimes dwarf the cost of doing the up-front work with the right specialists and doing the project right.

Some humans¹⁶ want to make things faster and more efficient. Taking care of a bunch of preliminary work up front seems like the smart thing to do. Instead of paying a plumber $100 an hour to go to Home Depot, buy a toilet, and then mark up the price when he resells it to me, I think I should do it myself! Or instead of working through and refining a product idea with a designer, an engineer, a marketer, and maybe a salesperson, I can do a lot of the leg work myself, then hand if off to those teams to design it, build it, and sell it. It seems so much more efficient. So much less wasted time.

So, here are our two propositions:

1. There are nuances in some kinds of work that non-experts are simply not aware of. Getting those nuances wrong can dramatically affect costs or results.
2. Many humans want to move fast and be efficient. (Sometimes, because they just want to be helpful and good to work with!)

Combining those two propositions shows the risks that can be created by well-meaning humans trying to be more efficient. Schedules can be delayed. Budgets can be overrun. Deadlines can be missed. Quality can suffer. Frustration and mistrust can build. Global mockery can be sparked. Again, all these costs despite the best of intentions.

This isn’t an argument that only experts can do certain work. It is an argument for considering expertise and the limits of non-experts¹⁷.

Experts: it’s okay to be an expert. I am glad the plumber gave me an accurate explanation of the issue and the fix. I am glad the plumber had a special source for weird toilets. I wish I’d thought to get his evaluation of whether the one I’d bought was appropriate to the location up front. It’s helpful to assert your knowledge and skill, especially if something seems off. You don’t have to take someone else’s word for it, even if they’re the boss, client, manager, or customer.

Non-experts: it’s okay to not be an expert. It’s fine to want to help. But realize you might actually be wildly wrong. I’m glad I didn’t insist to the plumber that I was perfectly capable of purchasing a toilet, thank you!, and insist he figure out how to install the one I’d bought. I’m okay with having had to return a toilet to the store—though it’s a strange item to return, and I certainly could have found other things to do with the time I spent on all of it. It’s helpful to seek out the advice and early guidance of experts, especially if you’re responsible for the project.

The single best technique for experts and non-experts when trying to understand the other’s perspective is curiosity. The plumber could get curious about what I was thinking and what I knew: “Hey, did you know there’s this thing called rough-in distance? And, uh, aside from that, what were the features of this toilet that were really important?” That would let him switch from an argument into teaching me what I didn’t know, while also letting him find the best possible replacement¹⁸. And I could get curious about what the plumber was thinking and what he knew that I didn’t: “What is it that makes this toilet not fit? How could I have known that? What else should I know here? What else in this project might I be wrong about?”

I’ll wrap this all up here, so when your memory has flushed away everything but the story, there’s a chance of a small takeaway.

Be curious. Focus on effectiveness over efficiency¹⁹.

And most importantly, hire a plumber.

1. Variously referred to as a powder room, half bath, main floor bathroom, guest bathroom… [↩]
2. Master Carpenters, LLC in Cedar Rapids. Layne’s a good guy. [↩]
3. Eww. [↩]
4. If you are curious what the rough-in distance for your toilet is, measure from the wall (not the floor trim!) to the floor bolts (often covered with those little white caps). That’s your rough-in distance. [↩]
5. As I finished typing that sentence, a plumbing van drove down my street in front of my house. I swear I am not making this up. [↩]
6. My dad’s house was built in the late 1800s. The supports for the main floor beams were actual logs, with bark still on. That kind of stuff is hard to standardize. Or I could imagine that once upon a time, before building codes, manufacturers in different parts of the country would just build whatever rough-in they wanted and it’d be fine. You’d have your artisanal hand-crafted toilet and custom-craft your home’s plumbing around it. None of that was the situation here. [↩]
7. I just measured. [↩]
8. Never installed, and unused! [↩]
9. Including friends that we told this story to. Schadenfreude stories about home improvement projects are fun. When the story involves toilets, they’re typically five times funnier. [↩]
10. A small army of friends helped. Demolition parties are way more fun than solo demolition! [↩]
11. Hanging the drywall was mostly solo. My friend Steve helped a lot with the first round of mudding. Then my eldest child was born and I hired out the rest of the mudding and texturing. Professionals are so much faster at finishing drywall—it’s amazing. [↩]
12. I cut and installed the laminate myself. But most of the supervision was done by my weeks-old eldest from her baby swing. [↩]
13. Picking out a toilet that fits in your powder room, for example! [↩]
14. I would put project management into this category. I’d also put coaching and playing most sports into this category. In American football, saying “just throw it to the open receiver” or “yeah, it’s 3rd and 15, of course they’re going to throw it, just keep them from throwing for a first down” is easy, but executing on it is hard. [↩]
15. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” -Mark Twain [↩]
16. me included [↩]
17. At this point, I believe the Geneva Conventions require me to mention the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which individuals with limited expertise in a domain tend to overestimate their competence in that domain. [↩]
18. The phrasing wasn’t quite so tidy, but this is essentially what the plumber did and said! [↩]
19. Or perhaps “outcomes over output“. [↩]