Bathtub Stuck Free — Working & Proven

She braced her feet against the wall, gripped the tub’s rim, and heaved.

Over the next week, Lena tried everything. A sledgehammer only chipped the enamel. A heat gun turned the epoxy into a kind of superglue-scented napalm. A contractor named Jerry came by, took one look, laughed for thirty seconds straight, and quoted her nine thousand dollars to “cut out the floor, lift the tub with a chain hoist, and rebuild the joists from scratch.” Lena didn’t have nine thousand dollars. She had a bathtub that was now load-bearing. bathtub stuck

Nothing.

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. She braced her feet against the wall, gripped

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. A heat gun turned the epoxy into a

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.

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.