DIY fest episode 2

The B&Q mentioned on 22nd April was actually the Grand High Temple of DIY at New Malden. Huge great place, roughly square in plan and sufficiently huge that B&Q are planning to disguise one side of it by building flats up it and to disguise another side of it by building offices up it. It also runs to a café where an impressive model of this impressive development is on display and from where you have a panoramic view of the interior of the temple.

Our mission was shelving, but as an extra we hoped to replace the seat of our downstairs toilet which was both insecure and the wrong size - this despite Professor Google assuring us that seats were mostly of a one size fits all variety.

However, in our innocence, we light upon something called 'popular toilet seat white - soft close pure', a snip at £30 or so from an outfit called Cedo. Get the thing home and it is approximately the right size. Start to assemble it to find that the spindle of the hinge is not round, rather it is as illustrated, the lack of roundness all being due to the soft close business. Which means that you can't just shove the spindle into the waiting hole, you have to get the hole the right way round and the upshot was that I burst one of the holes to the accompaniment of much cursing. As a stop gap I assemble a seat with one half new and one half old, with the two halves not quite fitting together. The good news is that the fixings are very solid and easy to tighten up with the natty little spanner supplied.

At this point we think we will check Cedo out but find them elusive. The outfit at http://www.cedo.com/ doesn't seem to be right and that at http://www.cedointercultural.org/ (the intercultural CEnter for the study of Deserts and Oceans) is certainly not right. So we give up on that one, but investigating upstairs we decide that maybe Bemis would be a better bet and they do have the respectability conferred by a web site - http://www.bemismfg.com/. Off to the much more modestly sized Homebase up the road and get one of those. No soft close and no easy remove for cleaning, having decided that trying to pack such functionality into a pair of small, cheap, plastic hinges is not a good plan: something simple might be a better bet. Plus I thought that soft close was a pain, like those irritating doors you get in public places which are on fancy springs which you cannot just shut; you have to wait and let the spring do its thing in its own good time.

Get the thing home and it is exactly the right size. Fix it using the nut part of the fixings from Cedo - which is better than the one from Bemis - and all is well.

And as bonus 1 we now have a selection of parts from toilet seats hanging up in the garage roof. We have a bet on on whether we will ever find a use from them. Whether we will remember that they are there when we do have a use for them. Hopefully this last day will not come for many a year. Bonus 2 is the entertaining cedo site about oceans, the ocean in question being the far north of the Gulf of California, something of an abuse of language, but an entertaining site just the same