Tomfoolery and Tubthievery
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a renovation with no consideration of restoration. When you buy a house, you’ve bought everything in it. Why wouldn’t you try to use (or at least sell) what you can?
One house that we bought to flip had a vintage clawfoot tub. Though charming, it was, in fact, in the way. Getting it out would have been most easily accomplished with a sawzall or sledgehammer, but I assumed we might snag a few bucks by selling it online. Along with my oldest son, Avery, the beast got wrangled outside, slid on its side on cardboard through several doorways. It was a bear of a job in retrospect and I’m impressed that we got it done without calling in the reserves.
Getting it out of the way was the main objective. There wasn't a clear plan beyond that. It sat on the back patio for the next couple months, collecting rain and leaves, and at some point it started to seem sensible to clean it up and put it back in; I mean, I am, after all, a flipper. It seemed like it would work well in the other bathroom, not the one it came out of. And a vintage clawfoot tub is luxurious and comfortable. People want them. We decided to refurbish it and put it back in, but in the meantime, it could sit right there on the back patio and wait.
Well, one day it got tired of waiting. I’m not sure how many days it took me to notice, but it was there. And then it wasn’t. It walked off. Or got dragged off.
Somehow, with neighbors on every side, all of whom I had met and befriended, the tub walked off. It must have been like a scaled down jewel heist. A truck backed up, a crew of probably three or four, certainly under cover of darkness… they must have scouted the place for weeks. Dark jumpsuits and infrared goggles and the whole deal.
Alternately it may have been a comical sideshow of tweaked out clowns. There may have been poor communication and cursing and possibly a tremendous amount of metallic scraping and banging. Either way I never heard a single report of suspicious behavior from any of the neighbors.
I did tell Mike, next door, and he was going to do some asking around. His tone suggested he might take matters into his own hands if he found it.
“Mike, it’s just a tub. Don’t go and get yourself knifed over a tub.”
He assured me that he wouldn’t. We never found the thieves or the tub, despite Mike’s attempts and a little bit of back alley slow rolling on my part. Maybe it made its way to a boutique dealer, or a pawn shop. Or maybe just scrapped for cash at Kroot's. I’m going with the latter. Isn’t it funny to picture the scene where this two hundred pound tub walked away? What kind of desperate, or determined, do you have to be?
We still liked the idea of the claw foot tub. It was an easier and more elegant solution than a shower stall or insert, so we went looking for another one. Thanks to Craigslist, we had two good options in Indianapolis. One involved a second story staircase and the other didn’t, so we went with the other (easy decision, even though the guy offered to carry it down and load it for an extra $75.)
Being in the COVID era, we saw an opportunity to make a day of it, so we shoved the whole family in the truck on a rainy February day and went tub hunting. The bohemian household where the tub lived featured a couple of very friendly folks who invited us around back to their garage. We (especially me) were in the ultra-paranoid phase of the pandemic and were careful not to look our hosts in the eye for too long for fear of exchanging too much air. Of course, little did we know at the time that our cloth masks were all but useless.
The tub didn’t look quite as good as it did in the pics, but we were here, and it certainly seemed good enough to clean up, repaint, and install. The patio was a minefield of dog poop which we had to negotiate as a familial unit, struggling with the weight of the cast iron behemoth. I couldn’t believe that Avery and I got the original (stolen) tub one out by ourselves, and again, I couldn’t help but laugh to myself as I pictured the thieves in their cover-of-darkness escapade. I wonder if they swore at each other, or let go of the tub to clonk each other on the head-- Larry, Curly, and Moe Style. Not us, though. We got that thing in the truck with nary a scrape or profane exclamation.
We thought we’d check out downtown Indy while we were out and found Mass Ave a ghost town. Of the memories of this day, this one stands stark as a reminder of that period of life and how shocking and sad it was to see society closed for business. The whole reason we bought this particular house was to have a project to occupy us during this bleak period of human history. Deserted Mass Ave epitomized how uniquely desperate the world was in 2020. Which brings the tub thieves into a new light. Everyone was desperate for any number of things back then and I can only assume that the income provided by that tub, either at the scrapyard or a pawn shop, or wherever, provided something they needed. I can’t cast too many stones about the cost or inconvenience of it all. The new tub still cost less than a shower stall or insert or whatever other plan I didn’t want to do, and it really did turn out beautifully. Not to mention, we had a fun family day that wouldn’t have otherwise happened. And they got whatever it was they needed. Win-win?
This annoying act of thievery turned into a happy family memory. We might not have found a pizza place that was open and ready to welcome five quarantine-defying souls but we spent a day righting a wrong together.
We also never did any tire tread analysis and I still can’t believe that no one saw or heard a thing. None of this makes me second guess my practice of getting to know all the neighbors first thing when we buy a new house. Neighbors need to watch out for one another and even if someone was keeping mum about something, being distrustful is no way to go about life. Sure, I wish I had the original tub and the $250 I spent to replace it, but instead, I have this story, and stories last forever.