This is an addendum to the story I posted yesterday.

Today, we installed the toilet back in our master bathroom now that the tile is all done. However, there was one adventure left in this home improvement task.

Christine helped me move the toilet. I lifted it up and she used a plastic bag to remove the old wax ring from the bottom of the toilet bowl. Then I proceeded to move it to its home base...

As I moved the toilet from the shower stall where it was sitting on a piece of cardboard, I knocked it into one of the metal toilet paper roll brackets on the side of the vanity. The bracket broke off and fell. Where did it fall? The worst place possible, of course: Right down into the drain pipe in the floor for the toilet.

We could see the bracket at the bottom where there is an elbow in the ABS pipe so I grabbed a fiberglass pole I use to fish wire with and tried to fish it out. It looked hopeful, but eventually, it fell down further to a spot where I couldn’t see it.

Christine had to leave for an appointment, so we stopped right there determined to do something later.

Because Christine was gone, I had the responsibility of picking Maya up from school in the afternoon. While sitting in the car waiting for the bell to ring, I came up with a new idea for getting the bracket out of the pipe: a magnet. I could disassemble an old hard drive and use the super-powerful magnet inside to lure the bracket and lift it out of the drain pipe.

When I got home, I tried using a couple refrigerator magnets on the braket that was still attached. No dice. The brackets didn’t have any iron in them. A magnet wasn’t going to work.

The next step was going down into the basement and removing the cleanout plug for that drainpipe, flushing water down the drain, and catching the bracket as it went down. I volunteered Christine for the job (because her hands are smaller than mine (luckily, for me). I told her I would try to find some rubber or latex gloves she could wear.

Then I thought of another idea: a small strainer. We could put a small strainer into the cleanout and it would catch the bracket. We didn’t have any small strainers, but I knew where we could probably get one for cheap: the dollar store.

I went to the dollar store and got not one, but four plastic strainers of varying sizes for a buck. The smallest one fit perfectly in the cleanout.

Christine was eating some dinner, so I asked Maya to help. I showed her how to hold a bucket to catch any water that might splash out of the cleanout and told her I would go upstairs, knock on the floor, and then flush the toilet (which I had re-attached to the floor and water supply).

I went up, knocked a few times on the new tile, and flushed. Then I went down and, sure enough, there was the bracket, in the strainer- along with a piece of the old wax ring off the bottom of the toilet that Christine had been unable to completely remove earlier.

And that, my friends, is how we saved the toilet paper roll bracket from the ocean... or whatever.