The Stormy Bathtub

Sunday evening, as we ladies were sitting in front of Downton Abbey (or perhaps the "Life in the Manor House" special that preceded it ...) I heard an enormous crash of thunder overhead. Goodness! I thought. I didn't realize the weather was that bad!

Well, as it turned out, it wasn't thunder. It was the bathtub upstairs. With Adam in it. Two of its legs gave way. (I'd noticed it had a menacing wobble for the past few weeks.) Evidently the water in the tub "whoooshed!!!" all over the floor, so there were both thunder and flooding in this weather event in the bathroom. I'm so glad Adam wasn't standing up! It's such a great, deep, long, good-soaking tub. This is what it looked like:

Notice how the PVC pipe is sheered off on the bottom. It came completely off the tub, and came out of the floor opening.
Adam is very handy. Plumbing, electrical, roofing, car repair ... he's done it all. He particularly hates plumbing, but at least this fix did not require squeezing himself under a house with the spiders and snakes, as it did years ago.

He did some measuring, and then I helped him lift the tub off the floor. Well, he lifted, and I shoved these two bee boxes underneath. Then he could reattach the legs. They'd been attached before with bolts that were too short, and hadn't been tightened with a wrench. That's why they eventually gave way.

(For some reason, that tub looks to me like a cow, hoisted up off the barn floor with a tummy girdle and a pulley.)
Anyway, then the plumbing repair commenced. At first, Adam tried to do his $3 fix, which  meant buying only the bare parts needed, and cutting them himself. But he found that there was one part that you can no longer buy, all by itself. I think it was the flexible hose, not the PVC.

The general chaos in the bathroom gave Julia a prime opportunity to sweet the corners, and behind the tub.

When Adam is playing handy-man, he spends a lot of time on the floor.

That's a sad sight, a tub with a wide open drain :(

So, Adam had to go back to town and do the $37 fix -- a kit with the various pieces for the entire fit-out, whether he needed them all or not. It even came with a new REAL plug, so we don't have to use the rubber stopper anymore.