And now, as Lena pried, the tub was not lifting. The floor was lifting with it.
She froze. “No,” she whispered.
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. bathtub stuck
She braced her feet against the wall, gripped the tub’s rim, and heaved. And now, as Lena pried, the tub was not lifting
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.” “No,” she whispered
Lena peered into the crawl space below. Through the jagged hole in the floor, she could see the living room ceiling. Specifically, she could see the ceiling fan spinning lazily directly beneath the bathroom.
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.