Bathtub Stuck May 2026

She tried again, this time with a grunt. The tub shifted an inch, then stopped. Lena frowned, got a crowbar, and worked it under one of the feet. The foot lifted half an inch—and then something deep in the floorboards groaned, a sound like an old ship settling into its grave.

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. bathtub stuck

Too late. The floor had other plans.

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. She tried again, this time with a grunt

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. The foot lifted half an inch—and then something

So she improvised.