Stuck | Bathtub

Nothing.

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

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. Nothing

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. A sledgehammer only chipped the enamel

And now, as Lena pried, the tub was not lifting. The floor was lifting with it.

So she improvised.

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.