Toilets: check!

Last week we had the inspection for our new house. For the most part things went very well.
The biggest issue was discovered when I peed in the upstairs guest bathroom (the inspection lasted four hours--how's a pregnant lady supposed to hold it that long?!), and then realized that the toilet had been turned off for some reason, so I couldn't flush.

After fiddling with the lever and lifting the back of the toilet to look in the tank, I realized there was no water in the tank--and no way I was going to fix this on my own. I went back downstairs to find Joe and the inspector, and followed them around for awhile before I could tell Joe about my abandoned pee without the inspector hearing (because I was just a bit embarrassed). Joe gave me a look that said "You can't be serious" and then whispered, "So you want me to go fix it?"

"Uh, yeah," I said, "unless you just want to leave it for the owners to find." He frowned at me and I said, "Well, obviously something doesn't work. Aren't you glad I at least found that out?" His facial expression suggested that no, he was not glad.

He ditched the inspector, went upstairs, started fiddling around with the guts of the toilet, and then once he had it turned back on, discovered that the shut off value was leaking on the floor. As the water slowly dripped onto the tile, Joe gave it a flush--and the water didn't go down. He flushed again and it nearly overflowed. Apparently the toilet not only leaked, but was also backed up, which must have been why it was shut off in the first place.

By this point the inspector had joined us in the bathroom to see what was going on, and as the diluted water filled the toilet bowl to the brim, leaving the toilet paper swirling gently in the middle, he started saying that sometimes toilets just need to be plunged if you're trying to send through a "large quantity," and that he didn't think this toilet's inability to flush was a significant problem in terms of the inspection. I realized that he was suggesting I might have just taken a giant poop and blocked the toilet, so I felt compelled to explain that all I'd done was pee. A lot of pee, perhaps, but not something that's going to clog a toilet. This was partly because I thought a dysfunctional toilet was not something we should gloss over in our inspection report, but largely because I thought having to say the word "pee" in front of him was less embarrassing than him thinking that I had clogged the toilet doing number 2.

Joe, still kneeling on the bathroom floor fixing someone else's toilet, gave me a look that said, "Who brought you along, anyway?" and turned off the water again so that the dripping would stop. We couldn't find a plunger, so we left that little surprise for the current owners and added a stipulation to the inspection report that the upstairs toilets must be in working order when we come back for a second inspection. (The inspector said the toilet in the master bath was also a "slow flusher," whatever that means. I stayed out of that one.)

The current owners didn't say anything about the nearly overflowing toilet in the guest bathroom, but they did have a plumber come in to fix the toilets. On Monday this week we went back and checked them out, along with a few other things. I felt like someone with a strange fetish, walking into someone else's home just to flush their toilets. I did ask Joe if he thought I should pee in the guest bathroom again so we could compare like data, but he did not seem to think that was necessary. The toilets flushed just fine, so we signed the inspection notice and now are waiting for them to get back to us by Friday. Perhaps my method was not the best way to go about inspecting a toilet for problems, but I guess it worked.