All that for such a small job!

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You must be getting used to all my tales of plumbing by now Sometimes it seems that lots of things go wrong at once. I guess if many household items are around the same age it stands to reason that they will wear out at around the same time. And this house does have a lot of plumbing, with two kitchen sinks and four bathrooms. In the last couple of years I have fitted a new tap to the basin in the downstairs toilet, a new flushing mechanism to the toilet in the main bathroom, a new kitchen sink and tap just last month (as you know!) and solved a major blocked drain issue which affected two of the bathrooms upstairs (because everything in both rooms was draining into the same outlet). Next on the list was our en-suite toilet. The flush stopped working, and I knew that replacing this would be a simple 15 minute job – if only we could get to it! The problem was that our predecessors loved everything to be neatly enclosed, which means that practically the entire bathroom is tiled, with all the pipes boxed in and tiled over, and no simple access hatch or anything like that. So there was no way to reach a hand underneath the cistern to unscrew the flush. And those tiles are unlike anything available today and we don’t have any spares in case we break any. What to do? After examining it from every angle it seemed that there was no option but to try to cut out a panel from the tiled false wall. My partner spent a lot of time scraping the grout from between the lines of tiles and then cutting carefully down the row to bisect the MDF the tiles were mounted on. Then there was still a wooden batten supporting the MDF, which seemed to be glued in position, so that had to be sawn through. Finally we were able to lift a panel away intact, nothing broken At that point my partner had a look online for replacement parts but found that none of the available fittings seemed to be a suitable size for our cistern which is unusually wide and not very deep. So he gloomily concluded we would have to replace everything. Well, today he was back at work so I decided that, rather than spending hours online trawling suppliers and trying to find all the technical details, I would try and remove the old fitting and then resort to my preferred method of taking it to a shop and asking for help finding something suitable to replace it. I got it out without too much trouble, cleaned everything up (literally shovelling limescale out of the cistern!), and then it became obvious that the problem was a couple of big tears in a thin plastic membrane which acts as a sort of valve. And I wondered if we could actually find something to replace just that part. A rummage around in the garage yielded some thinnish plastic sheet – I think it’s damp-proof membrane – and I cut out the right shape and fitted it, put the whole thing back together … and it works like a charm! All that hassle and time to get at it and in the end the job took just a few minutes and I didn’t even need to buy anything! Now just need to put the tiles back. I’m going to fix a batten across the space then put the panel back with silicone sealant so it can be easily removed again if necessary. All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2026.