Updates:
- our recycling got picked up on Thursday before the high winds blew everything all over the street. I only had to collect one soggy bit of paper from the front lawn afterward.
- I fixed the toilet! It only took me 3 hours and 10 minutes longer than the 15 minutes the manufacturer suggests should be more than sufficient to install their "easy to install" "universal" fill valve.
It might have helped if the instruction sheet wasn't total crap. Like maybe include a diagram with labelled parts? I can quote employment standards legislation for you, explain how "stage right" and "stage left" differ from "camera right" and "camera left" and name dozens of yoga poses in both English and Sanskrit. But I'm not a plumber. To me, a "washer" is a machine one puts clothes into to clean them. Well, okay: in a plumbing context I do know I'm probably looking for a rubber ring. But when you manufacture the shank seal and the cone washer as all one piece, and leave it up to the end-user to cut the two pieces apart, you could maybe at least explain that in your instructions! These instructions don't mention the cone washer at all, and the only reference to the shank seal says, "With the tank washer attached, insert the threaded end of the valve through the hole..." (They actually call the part a "shank seal" in the parts list, but a "tank washer" in the installation instructions.) It took me a bit to figure this out.
Then, after I finally installed the part, the wretched thing didn't work!
No matter how I adjusted the water level adjustment screw, the thing either tried to fill the tank higher than the overflow pipe or it didn't fill the tank at all. My eyesight is not what it used to be, and it took me a while to realize that the problem here was that the massive float on the fill valve wasn't floating because it was jammed up against the styrofoam lining inside the tank.
So... drained the tank again. Removed the fill valve. Attempted to re-install it with my mother holding onto the part while I tightened the locknut, to ensure it wasn't pressing up against the foam this time.
Me (lying on the bathroom floor, wedged between the toilet and the bathtub): "Is the yellow plastic touching the styrofoam anywhere?"
Norma: "No. But it will be if I leave go."
A fill valve that doesn't work unless one removes the lid from the toilet tank and stands holding the valve pulled away from the side of the tank isn't really going to work for us. So out came the valve again so I could shave the styrofoam down with a kitchen knife. This operation also required my mother's assistance since, even with reading glasses on, I could not see what I was doing well enough with just the bathroom lights. So I asked my mother to shine a flashlight on my work for me. A simple task, one might think. Except my mother is easily distracted. And she constantly worries about the wrong things. She kept moving the flashlight away from where I needed it so she could check out where the bits of styrofoam I was shaving off were falling.
Norma: "Why don't you put down a piece of paper towel so the styrofoam doesn't fall on the floor?"
Me: "It's styrofoam! It won't hurt the floor!"
I had to cut right through the foam in one spot. So we'll likely end up with condensation on the outside of the tank now. But at least we have a working toilet again.
(The previous fill valve I installed was not this much grief! But it came packaged with good instructions that actually included a labelled parts list, and it had a nice, compact float that fit our tank. I gave my mother the packaging from that fill valve to take to the store last week so she would know what part she needed to buy. But the only store in the Booming Metropolis that sells plumbing parts no longer carries the brand of fill valve we got last time. The only one they had was the too-big one with the crap installation instructions.)
- After years of using a condom catheter that has caused (mostly my mother, but sometimes also me) no end of grief, my father finally agreed to have a foley. This was inserted on Thursday morning, and on Thursday my father actually got out of bed! And he was comfortable in his chair all day! Friday he got out of bed again, and again was comfortable. He did not take any kind of pain med all day, and in the evening he told my mother he was "almost euphoric" because it was so nice to not be in any pain. My father being up in his wheelchair is also good for me because having to lean over his bed to spoon feed him hurts my back. He is still too weak to feed himself in his chair now. But I don't have to lean as far to feed him in his chair, so my back is okay. Also: if I need to reposition him in his chair, I can do so standing on solid ground (not precariously perched on the thin rails of a bed frame) and the wheelchair is much more adjustable than the bed, so I can use gravity to help me more. Everyone was excited for this progress we had made. Then my father's PSW showed up on Saturday morning to get him out of bed and discovered that the foley was leaking.
So now my father is back on a condom catheter until the nurse can get the supplies she needs to redo the foley and have it not leak this time.
The good news is that a foley is going to need regular attention from a nurse. Which means that my father will need to stay on the home nursing service forever. (Previously, they kept cutting him off the service. Then, inevitably something would go wrong within a week of them cutting my father off which meant he needed the service again, but there are always delays and hassles for my mother to get him reinstated. Our idiot provincial government, in their desperation to pinch pennies wherever they can so their rich corporate buddies don't need to pay much in tax, keeps hamstringing our home care system. Which is stupid. Caring for my father in a long term care home would be much more expensive for the province than caring for him at home.) Aside from needing to remain on the nursing service because my father has ongoing needs that require the services of a nurse, a further benefit to my parents is that they don't need to pay for my father's medications while he's on the service. They also will not need to pay for any ambulance rides he might need while he's on the service. ("Universal" healthcare in Ontario doesn't cover drugs or ambulances for most people. But it does cover these things for patients in hospitals. Patients of home nursing care are for some reason considered the same as hospital patients in these regards.)
- still no dishwasher. But a contractor is supposedly coming to look at that tomorrow.
- the back door is still messed up. Since it's current state is the state it was left in by the guy who installed the door the time we already had to call him back to fix the problem that the door had stopped locking, it seems we are stuck with it the way it is.