Hi! I’m trying to figure out if my anti fat biases etc are colouring my view. Background: I’ve lived in an olderish apartment (1970s) for about a decade, got a new upstairs neighbour a couple of years ago and now my bathroom ceiling leaks, grows mold etc. The maintenance folks have cut through the drywall a few times, confirmed mold, replaced the pipes, checked and watched for leaks without luck.
My guess as to what’s happening is that the bathtub is an older one and the new neighbour is really big (for a Canadian. Like, not infinifat or whatever but would definitely take up more than a seat in the movies or airplanes) and not just belly fat but quite wide as well. I can’t imagine he can turn in the shower without the sheets coming out of the tub and spilling water all over the ground (and with our poor molding etc I could easily see it working its way down)
Unsure how to bring it up so I figured I’d check and see if that’s even a thing that actually happens or if that’s just my inherent anti fat assumptions going to work. I don’t know anyone socially even close to his size so don’t really know where else to ask.
Nothing to do with being fat. Some people have zero idea how a shower works. You need to put the liner IN the tub area and the decorative curtain outside the tub. Many people push them both outside the tub. Now all the water that splashes around hits the liner and drains right onto the floor and not into the tub.
The amount of water splashing makes no difference if you’re big or small. Pressurized water hitting you is going to bounce all over. Since you’re taking a shower, that’s the goal.
If I had to guess, the curtain is wrong, he has no idea because nobody has ever told him and the bathroom is terribly non water tight so splashing will go down through the floor. Even tile is not waterproof nor is grout.
It’s why I always specify a waterproof membrane and floor drain but it’s not common in US/Canada yet.
I had some flatmates in college who didn’t know the difference between the waterproof liners and the decorative ones and kept buying decorative ones and wondering why the floor was getting wet. I told them they needed two, but noooo they weren’t idiots they got into college (narrator: they were idiots). I think one dude musta spent a hundred bucks on liners before listening to me.
In my experience doing home repair calls, they’re neglecting the environment they are living in. This isn’t unique to obese people but I’m sure it contributes strongly to their apathetic nature. So you’re likely right that the water is just splashing around and left to sit cause they aren’t agile enough or don’t care enough to take care of the environment they are living in.
You can make a wet bathroom, these are popular in Asian communities where the entire bathroom is a shower.
Even without the entire bathroom being a shower, having the entire bathroom be water tight with a drain just seems like the right idea. Drippings/splashes from the shower, common location for plumbing repairs, clogged toilet, in general a humid place. Building it not water proof is just setting up for failure.
That makes sense, thanks! Admittedly, I’m not sure I’d be wiping down the floor everytime I showered if I splashed a bunch of water each and every time.
Wet bathroom sounds amazing, I now want one when I buy a place.
Yeah I had one in my first apartment miss that a bunch.
Another cause is water coming in from the side of the building or when the cable guy drills through the wall and calls it good.
I had this issue in a ground floor apartment once, it turned out that the people upstairs didn’t have a shower curtain.
That seems insane! But anything is possible.
