I’ve spent more than a week in New Orleans, partly to prepare for a weekend visit from three grandchildren and two of their friend girls.
There’s an important house rule for upstairs guests in our home. When I try to explain it, I am met by incredulous expressions, as though I am making it up.
The problem goes back to an upstairs bathroom remodeling project years ago. It required the claw-foot, free-standing bathtub to be removed  while a contractor replaced the carpet on the floor with tile. There are many reasons why a bathroom floor does not need carpet and no reason that I can think of why it does, but that’s another story.
Plumbers removed the tub during the flooring project. Once it was completed, they came back to reset the tub and reconnect its plumbing. Simple, yes? Except that nothing — and especially when plumbing is involved — ever turns out to be simple. An old,  cast-iron tub like that weighs between 250 and 300 pounds. It’s awkward to maneuver through a doorway, and the two men sent to move it had great difficulty.
The plumbers had even more trouble when they came back to reinstall it. They broke one of the tub’s unique claw feet going through the door opening. For some weeks afterward, the tub set propped up on a stack of three or four books whose combined widths kept the tub level with its other three legs. Then in a stroke of serendipity, I found an exact match for the broken foot in an architectural salvage yard.
But the broken tub foot was minor compared to the plumbing reconnection. When the plumbers attempted to reattach the tub’s drain to the household wastewater line, they could find no way to reconnect it, they said, without cutting a small access opening into the ceiling of the room directly under it. Never mind how it had been connected before, there was no way they could see how to reconnect without creating a new access.
(They told all of this to Rosemary who relayed it to me in Batesville where, she often reminds me, I usually am when there is a decision to be made about plumbing and other household mechanicals.)
So they cut an opening about eight inches square in the ceiling of the room downstairs. They guessed right and it opened just where the access was needed. Once everything had been reconnected and completed, I placed trim around edges of the small opening, and made sliding panel from the square of sheetrock that had been cut out.
Then one night I went to our bed, my side of which lies directly under the ceiling opening, to find a large wet spot where I had intended to lay my head. Water dripped suspiciously from the trap door above. When we called the plumbers back to look for a misconnection, no water leaked. Water drained from the upstairs tub, entered the pipes and drained away as it should. After much pondering and the process of elimination, we finally discovered that somehow the weight of a person in the tub while water is being drained creates a misalignment that allows water to escape its intended course and to cascade down into our bedroom — onto me, if I happen to be sleeping there.
Once a visitor’s miscalculation introduced a torrent through the downstairs ceiling opening that poured into my sleeping face. It caught me in deep sleep and with such surprise that I must have thought I was drowning. My yelling about drowning had momentarily alarmed the whole household, they told me. Then I was strongly admonished for having overreacted to “a little bit of water.”
So the rule is, of course, don’t open the tub drain until you are out of it.
And that’s the way things are on Laurel Street in Uptown New Orleans where we have found that it is easier to learn how to live with plumbing misalignments than to correct them.