My hot tub is floating, and that’s not a good thing

How a relief turns into frustration and then into something unexpected

When we first looked at the house we now own, my wife and I drove past and kept on rolling. “Too far north,” I said. She shook her head at me, and we kept looking. A month later we were back, and I recall thinking the front of the house looked familiar. “Yeah,” my wife rolled her eyes, “this is the one you said was too far north.” There might have been a little mocking tone in there somewhere. We walked up the driveway, and we parted ways (as we always did on home tours); her to the inside, me to the yard.

What is it that draws you in when you find the right place on a home search? Is it the profile of the house as it sits above the street? Is it the noise or the quiet, the walkability, or the lack of other houses in sight?

For me it’s a combination of strange but highly valuable things.

1. Outdoor space reigns supreme. I don’t just garden because I have an agriculture degree, I really love growing food outdoors. And my children need space to run and play and dig. My dogs need grass to lounge in.

2. Garage or shed or not-in-the-finished-part-of-the-house space is required. I build stuff, I fix stuff, and I’m generally a messy person when I get creative. I need somewhere that’s okay to spill paint and cut cement boards.

3. A location with transit options and bike-ability is a must. I work from home now, but we all had to commute once upon a time. I don’t mind walking or doing a bike/bus combo to get to and from work and other places, but I need somewhere safe to walk or ride.

4. Oh yeah, the inside of the house should be nice, too.

I walked into the side and backyards of this house on that fateful day. There was still snow on the ground from a late spring storm. But from where I walked, I could see just how immense the backyard was, and I fell in love with it. There was plenty of grass for the kids to play, trees to build a fort in, and loads of room for the biggest garden I’d ever designed.

And then I walked inside.

Most of the house was nice, typical, not that stunning. But downstairs, where the house should have ended in a comfortable TV room, someone had built an addition. I went through the double doors into a dedicated rec room that now has foosball and air hockey and tables for board games, and there was still more of the house to see. I turned and gazed through a glass door at…

An actual, I-kid-you-not spa room complete with a 6-person, in-ground hot tub, a 3-person sauna, and a shower in the corner. It was all exposed cedar, had four skylights, and the slider to the patio would let in a cool breeze in the summer.

“We’re buying this one,” I said to my wife as we climbed back into the car. She grinned in victory.

Let’s talk about that hot tub

Okay, I’ll admit that it wasn’t a new hot tub. In fact I think it was older than my wife (and no, I am not telling you the precise number, except to say that hot tubs shouldn’t be that old and still work). But after a few weeks of fiddling and futzing, we figured out how to run it, how to clean it, and how to use it at all hours of the day and night.

And use it we did!

Many mornings I would stumble out of bed and dunk myself in that thing as I woke up. Ten minutes in the blasting heat of those jets could melt away muscle tension like nothing else, and I showed up at work rosy and resilient. I’d come home to it after a hard day or a filthy excursion in the garden. Me and that tub, we had some good times. Had you asked me at any point before we bought this house if I would ever consider myself a hot tub person, I would certainly have said no, and hot damn was I wrong about that!

I was addicted to that thing. I craved it. I think I even almost fell asleep in it once.

And sure, the 80’s vibe was very swirly blue, and yes I know the modern hot tubs have something like 45 jets and mine only had 8, but hey, I love lots of old things. Old things are cool. And old stuff that lasts is the real deal. I was determined to get as much mileage out of that tub as was humanly possible.

But first the on switch for the timer broke, and it was not the sort of thing I could get a replacement part for. So we set a nightly reminder to manually turn the jets on for heating and filtering, and I’d turn it on in the mornings for my warmup.

It was fine. No big deal.

And then the water level kept going down, so we put water in it twice a week.

Then three days a week.

Then almost daily.

I mean, that can’t be anything bad, right? Like a leak? No, it couldn’t be leaking.

The death scene

I’ll do my best not to sniffle as I recall this part. We turned it on one morning in the summer, and we walked away as we always did. The off switch had been fine after all. But 9 hours later, walking by outside in the garden, I heard it running. I went inside and turned it off with a towel over my fingers due to the incredible heat coming off the pump. And it never turned back on. Something inside had melted, fused together from all that overheating.

It took weeks for me to come to terms with the loss of that hot tub. You’re shaking your head and laughing at me, and I am telling you there were actual tears shed.¹

In my sadness I drained it, knowing all that water couldn’t stay inside the tub. But then, as happens so often, I walked away and learned to spend my time on other interests. Months went by, and I thought of the hot tub only when I would walk past that glass door and see it there, lonely, sad without me, useless and depressed. We talked about what to do with that space, and nothing seemed like the right answer. Replace it? Well no, it wasn’t reasonable to have a 6-person hot tub for the 4 of us, especially when the kids didn’t use it much. But a pool? Way better. And expensive. Out of reach, expensive.

So we waited.

And the weather cooled down.

And the holidays came.

And it snowed.

A lot.

Like really a lot.

No, more than you think.

It might have been something like two feet of snow over the course of ten days, which is not normal for the PNW. We were caught up in sledding and using 4-wheel drive to go grocery shopping. It was January, the holidays were over, and the kids were going nuts every time more snow came down. I focused on brushing it off the roof of my greenhouse (yeah the same one that was crushed the following year by snow). And so when it all melted in about half a day, we were overjoyed.

And sometime not long after, I walked past that glass door, and in my periphery I caught sight of motion in the spa room, a bobbing movement where the hot tub was floating.

Sorry, wait… Floating?

Yes, floating. The entire hot tub was floating up out of the ground it had been installed in, and (for reference) it weighed something like 300 pounds. But it was an empty fiberglass shell with no water inside to weigh it down, and all that melted snow had come in underneath and lifted it bodily out of that hole in the floor.

I must have stared at that thing through the glass for a solid five minutes before I could figure out what to do next. And obviously it was to go into the spa room and step on the edge to make it bob up and down more. I’m not the only guy who turns into a twelve-year-old when such things happen.

Needless to say, if it had been broken before, now it was destroyed. I tried filing a claim with insurance, but they came back two weeks later and said they didn’t cover anything with water from snow melt.² I solved the problem (somewhat) myself by sticking our little portable sump pump under it and draining the water out over the course of the next several days weeks.

The damage was done. The hot tub had to go.

A few other things transpired. I got injured, we were a busy family with kids, we had to spend money on other stuff, we (conveniently) forgot when the weather warmed up again, and we still could not figure out what to do with that space while we worked on some home remodel plans.

Yeah, you know another bad thing is coming. I mean, I’ve got a 7-foot by 7-foot hole in my concrete floor I’m not dealing with, and the world doesn’t shy away from invitations like that.

At some unknown point, rats got in somewhere (god help me, I still don’t know how or where) and had babies, and the babies fell in (because they were thirsty and stupid) and drowned in the three inches of water in the bottom of the thing. So I had to fish those out and dispose of them (shudder).

Interlude

If you haven’t yet bitten the bullet of home ownership, I highly recommend it. You will not find a finer way to develop a long list of great stories for barbecues and get-togethers than by purchasing your own home and tackling some type of renovation project yourself. Unless you decide to have kids, in which case no story you tell will ever really be about you again for the rest of your life.

Not mine, but close enough.

But then what?

That was the burning question. Neck-deep in a bathroom remodel, I was in no position to tackle sawzalling that tub into pieces and hauling it to the dump.³ My brilliant wife went around me and called a company to do the dirty work for us, including cleaning up any traces of that little rat family from the hole beneath the hot tub (which they did not find).

The actual hole in my floor.

Once it was gone and there was nothing but a gaping hole remaining, I felt a sense of peace. The dead body was out of the house, all potential to revive it was gone from the world. I could let that part of my life go. Closure. That’s what I had.

As we considered the best use of that space for our current needs, my wife and I agreed that filling the hole in with concrete would allow us to ensure the safety and integrity of the foundation, keep out the rodents and the water, and let us use the space for new things.

Back when the pandemic started and I got sent home from my office, I mourned the loss of a free gym in any building I worked in. And I was the employee who really used those spaces. I used the treadmills and the rowers, the free weights, the yoga mats, the showers, the lockers. We didn’t know how long lockdown would last, and so I started picking up exercise equipment. A collection of elastic bands soon turned into a garage full of weightlifting equipment, and a vacant spa room was just the place to relocate.

Filling in the hole, adding puzzle flooring, and moving in all the exercise equipment

Now that my space is in its own dedicated room, no longer bunking with the power tools and garage projects, and I’m not interrupted in my chin-ups when my wife opens the garage doors to unload the groceries, I know that I can spend as much or as little time as I need to on workouts. I have a gym where my yoga mat can stay rolled out all the time. The rower never needs to be stored in a corner. I don’t accidentally kick the kids’ bikes when I use the gymnastic rings. And I can still duck into the sauna for a rest when I’m done with the lifting.

I miss my hot tub, but I got a whole room for myself out of the debacle. It was worth it.

Your trans friend,

Robin

Go on, beat my floating hot tub story. I dare you.

1. Pre-testosterone, obviously. I can still cry, sure, but it takes something way bigger now, like an ASPCA ad with Sarah McLachlan singing about puppies in jail.

2. Pardon me for being the idiot who pays for insurance, but if you don’t cover water, then what the hell are you covering??

3. And who doesn’t love cutting and playing with 40-year-old fiberglass??