The paint in the area the toilet was finished, so I put the toilet back together. There's nothing very interesting to say about that; it fit back together just as it had come apart. While putting it together, I remembered that the tank on this toilet fills slowly. So I looked up the fill valve system online.
According to the printed text on the device, it is a Fluidmaster 400A series fill valve. And lucky for me, there is a troubleshooting guide for this particular apparatus on the company website.
http://www.fluidmaster.com/html/troubleshooting.html#q8
I assumed that it might be plugged, so I opened the cap...
...and sure enough, there was sediment plugging most of the holes...
...so I grabbed my Fluidmaster cleaning tools...
...and went to work.
The mini screwdriver was too big, so I mostly used the paperclip and the tweezers. And those little LED flashlights are the perfect size to hold in your mouth while working. It was annoying work, but eventually I fished out or broke up all of the sediment. The cap prevents the water from shooting straight up, so I used the cup to cover it while testing the water (this is illustrated in the troubleshooting web page, but they use a tiny china teacup for some reason...I felt that it was a job for a sturdy polypropylene travel mug).
After cleaning the apparatus, I snapped the cap back on and did a field test to see if the flow had improved. The toilet in the master bathroom has an identical Fluidmaster 400A, so I compared the fill times for the two toilets. Unfortunately, I hadn't thought to time the half bath toilet before cleaning it for comparison. Here are the results:
Half Bath: 68 seconds from lever pushed to finished filling.
Master Bath: 39 seconds.
So the toilet is obviously still slow, but my heart tells me it's better than it was. And if we need to replace the gasket like the troubleshooting guide suggests, it should be an easy job.
Alright, now I think I'm ready for some hardcore blogging.
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