Bathroom Makeover – Refinishing The Tub – New England's Narrow Road

Hideous!

When I bought my house, I knew there would be much to do to make it livable. While I was busy shelling out money for garage doors without holes in them, siding that wasn’t rotting off the walls and fixing the leaky basement, my tub was slowly peeling.

Someone (before I bought the place) had given the downstairs bathroom a quick makeover by slapping some white paint all over the tub and shower area – it’s even on the tiles. As we began to use that shower, the paint began to peel. It was impossible to clean the tub without pulling the layer of paint off, and the whole thing had become almost unusable and tremendously disgusting looking.

The house was built in the 1970’s and as I found out (and you can see here) the tub/shower had once been gold. In fact the guy who came out to give me an estimate for the refinishing said it looked like it had been refinished twice already.

So what’s your option when your bathroom looks like this? You can re-do the entire thing and rip out the old – but bathtubs won’t fit through doorways, so how do you get a new one in when they are usually installed when the house is built? Well, not without a lot of mess and huge amounts of money.

The only other option is to refinish the existing one. A company called “Miracle Method” did mine. It was suppose to take one day and ended up taking two full days. (Apparently my tub was one of the extremely gross ones.) Then one day (24 hours) for the job to cure. Fortunately I have another bathroom upstairs to use.

I had to pull off the wood strip along the base of the tub, take down the shower curtain rod (which was screwed into the tile) and have a plumber come out and remove the faucet, handle, etc. (He had to return to put new ones back on too.)

It was a messy job. Sanding down the tub caused white dust to fly everywhere and even though I took everything I could out of the room, I had to wipe down the walls and floor afterwards – after the horrible smell went away which took about 3 days.

It cost me a little over $1,000 for this, but I am happy with the results, even if the tub is not like a normal tub. It’s more like a paint job on a car. In fact the guy who did the job said it would hold up best if I applied Canuba wax to it occasionally! I also have to be careful when cleaning it. So, it’s not like a new tub, but like a “better than what was there” tub.