The flush-lever on our toilet broke. It’s the only functional toilet in our house since we’re remodeling the other bathroom. And of course it broke fairly late in the evening, after stores had closed. So we rigged a quick fix to get us through the night:

Here’s what it’s supposed to look like. You know, in case you’ve never seen a toilet before:

Once we got to the hardware store the next morning I was suddenly enamored by the idea of installing a dual-flush handle. That’s one of those doohickeys where you have a less-water option for liquid waste, and the normal flush option for solid waste. It’s a little more involved than just buying a new lever, but the store had an “everything included” kit that wouldn’t break the bank, so we went for it.

Of course when we got home we discovered the kit only worked with certain toilet setups, but the extra conversion kit to get the correct setup was also fairly inexpensive. (Though it did require another trip to the hardware store.) Just to keep things annoying, the original kit had a broken piece in it. So that required yet ANOTHER trip to the store, though Dave didn’t have any issues getting it exchanged. It’s a good thing that we live conveniently close to multiple hardware stores though.

After all that, the installation was pretty easy. Unfortunately I don’t understand these newfangled contraptions as well as I do old-school toilet tanks, so hopefully this will work forever and never break until the end of time. Ha! Here’s how the toilet tank used to look. This at least looks familiar to me:

And here’s how it looks now. Crazy:

Usage is simple enough: pull the lever up for the half flush, push it down for the normal flush. Since it looks pretty much like a normal flush-lever, we won’t have confused visitors yelling for help while doing their business. We hope. The lever isn’t exactly a piece of artwork, but it’s straightforward enough:

Pulling upward for the half-flush is slightly weird because you have to hold it for an extra beat for it to work, but pushing downward works exactly as it did before. All in all it works perfectly so we’re happy for this easy little improvement.

And I’m just going to stop now because there’s only so much I can say about a toilet.