After my last project, I tackled a small half-bath. There was a leak under the sink, with water inside the wall causing the sheetrock to get soft and puff out. I opened the wall to look for it, and eventually focused on the two shut off valves for hot and cold water to the sink.
When those valves were replaced, the water inside the wall dried up. There is still a slight leak at each one of the valves, which I may fix eventually, but it’s slow enough that it doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Some of the tiles on the floor near the sink were loose, so I decided to remove all the tiles and replace them. Just as with my previous project, I soon discovered that much of subfloor underneath the tiles was rotted out, as well as some of the floorboards below that. The wood was black with mold, concentrated under the sink, and even worse around the toilet.
I removed the toilet, then removed the entire subfloor, and scrubbed the floor with a bleach solution, which kills the mold. I then had to remove some of the floor boards and replace them, followed by a new subfloor, and new tiles.
The toilet caused a lot of problems, though. Underneath the toilet is the closet flange, which connects the toilet to the sewer line below the floor. The flange is a hollow tube or cylinder, several inches long and several inches in diameter, which inserts around or into the sewer line. The cylindrical portion is attached to a metal ring, which is supposed to lie flat on the floor, above the sewer line and bolted down. The toilet is then bolted to this ring; though most of the toilet’s weight rests directly on the floor, it’s actually connected to the floor via the flange ring.
My house is pushing a century, and back when it was constructed, flanges were cast iron, welded to the sewer line. The flange ring had broken, so that one of the grooves that holds a bolt to the toilet was missing. That is usually easy to repair with a replacement ring, but for very old flanges like mine, that didn’t work. So I had to remove the entire flange, by cutting into it with a hacksaw, then chipping at it with a screwdriver tapped by a hammer until it cracked and fell apart.
New flanges are quite cheap, around $10-12, and can be quite easy to install. The one I used was of hard plastic, and pushed down into the sewer line. Surrounding the flange is a rubber gasket which compresses between the outside of the flange and the inside of the sewer line, forming a tight seal. So far, so good.
But at this point, I confronted another problem. The position of the ring of the flange, which to repeat, bolts to the toilet, relative to the surface of the floor, is critical. Before the toilet is placed on top of the flange, a wax ring (or something similar) has to be placed over the flange. The wax sits at the bottom of the toilet and sort of oozes out to form a tight seal around the flange, preventing leaking. But if the flange ring is too low, more than a fraction of an inch below the surface of the floor, the seal is not formed, because of the extra space that the wax doesn’t get into. And if the flange ring is too high, just slightly above the surface of the floor, there isn’t enough room under the toilet for all the wax. It oozes out, preventing the toilet from sitting on the floor; it rocks.
There is a simple solution if the flange is too low; add another ring, which raises the top of the flange. But if the flange ring is too high, above the surface of the floor—which was my situation -there is no easy, ideal solution. You generally must either cut the end of the sewer pipe, to lower it and thus the flange, or raise the floor, by adding more subfloor. The first option was out, because at that point I had only a small hole in the floor to the sewer line, not large enough to get a saw in. And the second option would have meant taking off and discarding all the tiles, adding more subfloor, then re-tiling.
In fact, this was probably why there was so much water damage underneath the toilet in the first place. The original subfloor was very thin, quarter-inch plywood, and did not come up to the top of the flange ring. Thicker plywood would have provided a stronger floor and one that was level with the top of the flange. But I didn’t appreciate the problem when I was rebuilding the floor; I used the same dimension plywood, wanting to stick to the original specs as much as possible.
Anyway, to save myself a lot of grief, what I did was to put some tiles under the toilet, in effect raising just it the necessary amount above the flange. They actually sell tiles like this, which are used to cover rust stains surrounding the toilet, but which can be used just to raise the toilet. I made my own, though, from several 2’ x 1’ tiles that I bought. I placed the toilet on one of the tiles and traced the outline of it. I then cut that tile (it was very hard to cut, and I ended up using pruning sheers) to that shape, and also cut a hole inside the pattern, through which the flange ring would go. Each tile was about .10 inch thick; I made four of them, and stacked them on top of each other and placed them under the toilet.
Finally, in place of the original sink, which I removed from the wall, I bought a cheap but decent vanity/sink combination. Though I patched the hole in the wall I had opened, bonding sheet rock with joint compound, the vanity sits in front of the wall, and hides most of the repair job.
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