Bathtub — Stuck 2021

What Lena hadn’t known—couldn’t have known—was that the previous owner, a man named Horace who’d been a hoarder of both cats and amateur engineering, had “reinforced” the bathroom floor after a leaky pipe rotted the original joists. But Horace didn’t believe in screws or nails. Horace believed in spite. He’d slathered the underside of the tub with industrial epoxy and glued it directly to the subfloor. Then, for good measure, he’d poured a layer of quick-set concrete around the feet.

So she improvised.

A crack spiderwebbed across the bathroom tiles. Then another. The entire floor—a six-foot-by-eight-foot chunk of plywood, linoleum, and rot—began to tilt like a seesaw. Lena yelped and scrambled backward into the hallway. The tub, still stubbornly attached, rose two inches, three, then settled at a drunken angle, one claw still gripping the concrete like a stubborn cat on a screen door. bathtub stuck

Too late. The floor had other plans.

The New Yorker wrote a profile titled “The Bathtub That Ate the Bathroom.” A structural engineer offered to fix the floor for free in exchange for naming rights to the show. Lena declined. She’d grown fond of the arrangement. He’d slathered the underside of the tub with

First, she built a decorative skirt around the gaping hole in the floor—salvaged barn wood, very rustic. Then she installed a small ladder leading down from the tub into the living room. The ladder became a conversation piece. The tub, still full of water because the drain was now pointing at the chandelier, became an indoor pond. She added goldfish. She added a tiny fountain powered by an aquarium pump. She hung a sign on the bathroom door that read: “TUB IS TEMPORARILY A FEATURE. PLEASE BATHE IN THE KITCHEN SINK.” A crack spiderwebbed across the bathroom tiles

It started as a perfectly reasonable Sunday afternoon project. Lena had decided to replace the old claw-foot tub in her Victorian fixer-upper. The thing was a beast—cast iron, porcelain-coated, probably installed when Grover Cleveland was in office. She’d already sawed through the rusty supply lines and uncoupled the drain. Now came the moment of truth: wiggling the tub free from its century-long slumber.