Hey, everyone! I’m back. Sorry I’ve been quiet recently, but we finally moved!! We are so excited to be in our new house. There is so much more room for everyone, we love the neighborhood, and we are just soooo excited to undertake all these renovations. We have a long list of things to do under our sleeve…see this post for some details!

Today, I am not starting with the most glamorous topic- rusted toilet seat screws! Ugh! So frustrating! So we wanted to change the toilet seats in all the bathrooms. We allotted about 5 minutes for each swap, thinking what could go wrong? All you do is unscrew the old one, screw down the new one, and you’re all set! Not so easy, my friends! This 5 minute job wound up taking DAYS… days of trial and error! Eventually we figured out what worked and we thought this might help someone else in the same boat! So here goes…

How to Remove Rusted Toilet Seat Screws

So first thing we did was try to just use a screwdriver to dig around the rust and try to grasp the screw and turn it. That didn’t work, unsurprisingly. There was so much rust, the screwdriver could not get a grip at all! Here is my husband trying to work on it!

Then we tried WD-40, applying it to the top and bottom portion of the screws and letting it sit overnight. We hoped it would melt away some of the rust and make the darn thing turn! Nope! No such luck!

On to Plan C- the brute force attack! We wound up having to drill the screw out. We used a really small drill bit (1/16 “) and attacked the nut on the underside of the screw that keeps the screw in place. We kept drilling into the nut, trying to weaken it. It eventually worked and the screw and nut fell off! Whew! What a relief! Check out how rusted this thing was!

And the whole process always reminds me of the fact that there is no way to put a limit on how long these DIY projects can take! Even one as seemingly simple as replacing a toilet seat!

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