Removing a Toilet – It’s Easier Than You Think!

Toilets, am I right? I don’t care how you try to describe it, you can’t convince me they’re not gross. At least once in your life, you’re going to have to remove the toilet, even if temporarily. So far we’ve had to do it twice. The first time was to redo the floors in our powder bathroom and now we’re demoing the entire master bathroom and will be moving the toilet to the other side of the room. The idea of figuring out how to remove all of the water from the basin, unhook the plumbing and then pull it out of the ground takes it to a whole new level. Turns out though that the steps on how to remove a toilet and shockingly simple! Follow along in the video or scroll below to see how you do it.

While we’ve already done a ton of work to demo our bathroom such as removing the walls, vanity table and shower, none of that is necessary to remove the toilet. In fact, we can even begin to demo our floors until after the toilet has been removed. (The toilet sits on top of the tile). 

Remove a Toilet

1. First things first, turn off the water to the toilet. You can do this by turning the knob behind the toilet bowl that’s attached to the wall. Make sure you turn the knob all the way to guarantee the water is no longer flowing into the toilet 
2. Once the water is off, flush the toilet to get the water out of the tank. At this point, the tank and bowl should no refill with water. You can do this again if it helps. We still had a lot of water left in the bottom of the tank so Kevin used an old towel to try to get some of it up (and would ring it into the sink). This step, while kind of gross is crucial because when you remove the toilet, any water that’s left will end up all over the floor.
3. Now that the water is gone, grab a bucket or small bowl to place behind the toilet where it connects to the wall. Use a wrench to unscrew the tank from the waterline. There will be some water that comes out at this stage so don’t be alarmed by it.
4. Next, detach the toilet from the ground. To do this, there will be one screw on each side of the base covered by a small cap. The cap should easily pop off and then you can use your wrench (or two if needed) to unscrew the bolt underneath. Repeat this process on the other side of the toilet base.
5. Finally, use a utility knife to cut the caulk around the base of the toilet where it connects to the floor. Then you should easily be able to lift the toilet off.
6. If you’re replacing the area with a new toilet, go ahead and do that, but if you are waiting to have a plumber come look at your pipes like us, stuff an old towel down the hole to stop any gases from coming out into the room.

And that’s it! Removing the toilet seemed really scary at first, but this is a plumbing job everyone can do whether it’s to update your floors or put in a new toilet. Now the rest of the bathroom…aka making the shower water proof.. I guess we’ll see about that.

Stay tuned for our next update where we remove the sink vanity and all of the flooring. Then we find out that we’re going to end up having to rip up all of the subfloor to make space for all of the new plumbing. They say it gets worse before it gets better right? How much more demo can we do before we start to rebuild? I guess there’s only one way to find out.