Remodel Day 167 - 7/19/2011

Time to pause and catch you up on some of our continued (and seemingly endless) researching.  It's time to talk toilets.  At first I thought - ok - it's a toilet......how hard could that be?  Silly me. 

Choosing the right toilet proved to be much more time consuming than I had thought, considering we need to account for a few facts:

1. There are 6 people in our house.
2. Kids do not connect the act of using a toilet to the act of flushing a toilet.
3. Kids seem to lack the concept of what is a "reasonable" amount of toilet paper.

Which leads me to the discussion of toilet research.  We wanted one that

1. A soft close toilet lid.  So that Henry (who is a pointer not a setter) will keep all of his parts intact without the toilet slamming down on them.
2. The flushing mechanism can tolerate a great deal of use.
3. The flushing mechanism can handle a great deal of toilet paper.
4. The flushing mechanism can handle the occasional flushing of a MatchBox car.
5. The toilet lid is heavy enough to keep out Benny.  Don't underestimate the powers of a 10 pound shih tzu.  He has super powers to get into a toilet, but not such super powers on getting out.

We scoured the internet.  We read the reviews in Consumer Reports. We went to a multitude of stores.  We interviewed a number of salesman in the afore mentioned stores.  And here were our two final contenders.

1. American Standard Champion 4.  This was the number 1 rated toilet by Consumer Reports.  It's main selling feature is a 2 3/8" trap that gets rid of ........ ummmm...... let's say "solid waste" best. 

2. Toto Drake.  Also rated very high on Consumer Reports.  It's trap is smaller at 2 1/8".  But the flushing mechanism was rated much higher by the reviews on Consumer Reports and a number of other websites.

And the winner is .............. the TOTO DRAKE!

After all the research we decided that the actual users of the toilets (user reviews and salesman experience) pointed to the Toto line of toilets as the superior choice.  We shall see.