Before I go in detail about how poor some of the “how to” knowledge is at my nearby home improvement store, let me praise them for having the tools and supplies that I need 99% of the time. I’ve chosen this story as my opening post partly because I think it’s helpful, partly because I think it is a good story, but mostly because I don’t want to sound like a darn Home Depot spokesman in my future posts.

With that said, my bother owns a few rental houses (the poor guy). One night he calls me up and says that he’ll pay me to help fix a bathtub leak. Sounded like a good deal to me until I found out what I was really getting paid for…crawling under the house.

The bathtub appeared to have water underneath it. You could hear it when you stepped into the bathtub. My brother’s solution was pretty simple: “Just crawl under the house and drill holes under the bathtub to drain the water out.” I suddenly understood why I was getting paid.

After a half an hour of crawling through plastic, insulation, and cob webs, I reached the bathtub. I made a hole in the subfloor…nothing came out. After about five holes I realized that perhaps this was not the best solution. After careful inspection of the pipes and underside of the tub I realized what was going on. The tub was an old cast iron tub, and whoever remodeled the house last had one of the those “tub inserts” installed. The water had leaked and gotten trapped in-between the insert and the actual cast iron tub.

We removed the tub insert, drained the water, and removed a sample of the black rubber-like adhesive that was holding the insert in place. Surely Home Depot would know what this mysterious black adhesive was.

We first approached the paint counter. That made sense to us, I mean the mysterious black adhesive obviously came from a caulking tube, and there were many caulking tubes near the paint counter. The employee inspected our sample carefully. He then said “It looks like Henry’s 201.” He asked if we wanted a second opinion, and we did. Halfway down the isle a second employee examined the sample. “Henry’s 201″ he said. At this point I’m sold. However, one more opinion couldn’t hurt. Sure enough the third employee agreed that our sample resembled “Henry’s 201.” I would like to take this time to point out that “Henry’s 201″ is roofing tar! And that it does, in no way, resemble the rubbery like sample that we pulled out of our bathtub.

After buying many many tubes of “Henry’s 201″ and silicone caulking, we returned to the rental to reinstall the tub insert. As soon as I opened the first tube I looked at my brother and said “This is not even close to the right stuff.” For whatever reason, he decided to use it anyway. What a mess! If the tub insert ever needs to come out again, I do not want to be the one pulling it out.

The moral of the story is this: get a second opinion from someone in the trade. A quick call to any bathtub insert place could have recommended an adhesive product…and my guess is that “Henry’s 201″ would not be their recommendation.

-Jeff