If I had a Terry here in New York, I wouldn't have ever learned to put the toilets in myself. I would have bought them from him and happily paid him or Jamie to install them, and never learned as much as I have learned.
Sadly, there is no obvious place to go here to get a good install of a Toto at a fair price for the item and the labor; and forget about installing one with a Unifit; they want to price it like it's something from Mars. At least in speaking to probably 10 plumbers, including the one we have used for years. Six hundred dollars estimate to install a Carlyle II, not including the toilet? Really? I am sure that if I found the guy that's used to working on Totos, it would be more in range, but I am a pretty good researcher and I didn't. With those kind of numbers, I'm gonna learn to do myself what's a reasonable thing to do myself, mindful that if I go beyond my ability, the damage I could cause would far exceed what I would have paid someone to do it right the first time. But I think we all agree that rehabbing a faucet or installing a toilet is the kind of thing that most reasonably-agile people can do themselves if they educate themselves first. Doing the project myself gave me a great deal of appreciation for the pros that take the time to learn how to do it right and then do it right with pride. It also made me understand some of the joys of the profession (like making something mediocre into something nice, or fixing something broken and making it work the way it should and thereby eliminating little daily annoyances that people had come to accept but are thrilled to have fixed -- daily satisfaction on the job).
I saw a post in one forum here where a successful plumber told a guy who was just starting out that an enormous amount of business can be had just by asking folks, with some gentle suggestions of ideas, whether there is anything else they would like him to do while he was there to do whatever he was called to do. He pointed out that almost everyone has a pop-up drain that works poorly. I thought: what a genius! If our plumber had ever pointed out certain things to me that I have learned from this forum that I want fixed, they would have been fixed long ago, with money put in his pocket. Example: we probably have ten frozen 100-year old isolation valves in various parts of our system, (including the stop valve to the dishwasher -- I guess they just turned off the house water when installing it) so there's no way to isolate anything, and we definitely need a hot-water recirculation system and...we have a number of poorly-functioning pop-up drains. I would have happily had all that work done if someone had even asked about it and quoted a fair price. There is a peace of mind that comes from having everything working as best it can, and that has to give plumbers a great deal of personal satisfaction when they deliver it.