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I recently replaced one of my toilets and ran into a snag. I have another toilet to replace in the not-too-distant-future and I expect that I will encounter the same problem.

The bathroom has a newer floor, and after taking up the toilet I discovered that the new floor was simply laid on top of the old floor. Rather than replacing the toilet at the same time or at least taking the toilet up to install the floor properly, the new floor was cut to fit the body of the toilet as snugly as possible. Of course my new toilet has a different footprint than the old toilet, and rests on the new floor at the back of the toilet but the old floor at the front. I very-roughly hand cut some pieces of flooring and doubled them up under the front of the new toilet to at least keep it level. This still leaves a large gap that I need to some how cover/fill.

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I'm not sure what the best way is to deal with this. It hasn't been the highest on my list of things to work on, but this weekend my kids were taking a bath, splashed lots of water out of the tub, and some of it dripped into this space. It seems to be drying up fine, so I'm not worried about water damage (the old floor is linoleum and it is a one story house, so there is concrete below that). As a result of this event I figured that sealing the toilet to the floor would be a necessity, but apparently that might be controversial.

Regardless of whether or not I need to seal the toilet, I still don't want it to look this ugly forever. Is there any way to fix this up without ripping up the floors?

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  • Not if you want it to look professional. That's a shame. – isherwood Apr 1 '19 at 14:48
  • @isherwood lol, that's not the answer I'm looking for! Of course life doesn't always give us the answers we want... – conman Apr 1 '19 at 14:49
  • True. I didn't post it as an answer because there are folks more clever than I around. Maybe there's hope yet. – isherwood Apr 1 '19 at 15:01
  • @isherwood I was definitely irritated when I found out about this. From what I read, putting a new floor on top of an old floor isn't necessarily a crazy idea. Compared to installing new floors though, replacing a toilet is nothing. I feel like they could have at least replaced the 10+ year old toilet while they were at it. Not having to work around the toilet probably would have made the flooring easier, and it certainly would have given better results. sigh... – conman Apr 1 '19 at 15:18
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    Floating floors were designed to overlay other floors easily. The issue is that it was fit around the toilet. That's just wrong. – isherwood Apr 1 '19 at 15:21
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I ended up getting this fixed in what I suspect is the only way it would get fixed - I had the floor fixed. I was planning on doing it myself but when the toilet started leaking a bit (presumably because of some residual rocking due to the uneven floor) I finally just hired someone to come out and fix it quickly and correctly.

The toilet was conveniently located in a small alcove, maybe 4'x4' (wall on one side and the back, open in front, and a 3 foot wall on right). This made it easy to pull up the toilet, pull up a minimum of floor (about 8 "planks" total), and properly cut the floor so that it fits snugly around the toilet flange. The toilet was then reinstalled normally, and it looks perfect. If I had more time it would have been a very easy DIY project. Fixing the floor probably didn't take more than an hour total.

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