Well, after my original post and talking to the wife I decided to persue a colour match toilet seat.
Armitage shanks recommended:
Brokenbog.com - Retro & Discontinued Bathrooms. I got an exact colour match but a slightly different design. It was a bottom fitting seat but fortunately it was also friendly to a top fixing procedure. All I needed was the seat as it comes plus two Well Nuts. Brilliant... problem solved!! By the way brokenbog overcharge for the well nuts. See my link in original article to get these.
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Here is my original post again:
Well,
To anyone who finds this thread, you will find information that took me nearly two days to find.
You have found yourself in the unfortunate situation of breaking your toilet seat, only to discover that your toilet bowl does not have access from underneath to allow fixing of standard toilet seats (ie where the hinge requires a nut to be attached from underneath the bowl, to secure the seat). This is when you encounter the world of top fix, top fitting, top fixing, well nuts, blind hole fixing, ridiculously priced original manufacturers replacement seats etc. You have been to B&Q, Wickes, everywhere else you can think of, bought toilet seats and taken them back home only to discover that they cannot be fitted to your 'blind hole' 'top fixing' toilet bowl.
Well here is an end to the pain:
1. No doubt like me you have a coloured suite, a colour that does not match any of the 'standard' bathroom colours anymore. If you have one of the 5 or 6 available colours you are lucky. Just ask for that colour seat at any of the online outlets you can easily find on a google search. Just make SURE that the info says that the seat is TOP FIXING.
A top fixing seat should come with the hinge and the Well Nuts required to attach the hinge to the bowl. The Well nuts are the main piece that enable the hinge to be secured to the toilet bowl without having access from below. A Well nut is an assembly consisting of a rubber shrouded nut about 2 inches long, including an associated bolt. This is used to secure the hinge to the toilet bowl. By tightening the bolt (after pushing the rubber shrouded piece through the opening in the top of the toilet bowl) the rubber balloons out, securing the hinge to the bowl.
Beware that some top fixing seats do not come with Well Nuts. See the following link to get these:
W.C. Seats, Connectors & Accessories
Scroll down to 'Toilet seat fixings' and you will see them listed there. Two for Ā£3.80.
2. So if you are at this step, you have a coloured suite that cannot be matched. So like me you are probably looking for a wooden or wood effect seat that is top fixing. Dream on. The only top fixing ones are plastic or mdf painted varieties. And the vast majority are either black or white. So what now:
You need to solve the problem in two stages:
a) See the following link:
Blind Hole Toilet Seat Hinges
Here you will see the bracket /hinge and Well Nut combination assembly.
b) To the above you just need to add a wooden seat, and screw this to the assembly. The trick (which I STILL need to solve) is finding a seat that has no pre-drilled holes in it).
And that's it!
Good luck.
PS if anyone finds a source of wooden seats with no pre-drilled holes, please let me know (private email). Don't know if the forum will allow me to post my email but here goes anyway:
[email protected]
