Rub-a-dub-dub

  Tub! 
  Originally uploaded by emira.

One of my greatest delights upon first inspecting the house was my suspicion that behind the bad, crumbly, moldy tub surround was a 3/4 size claw foot tub. The shape of the tub itself -- deep, with the faucets set into the tub not above -- suggested a claw foot for sure and inspite of the icky surround the glazing on the tub appeared to be in pretty good shape. So when Martin came back to check the place out we did some more investigating, and sure enough: claw foot tub-y goodness.

The bathroom has some other pretty cute features, including the robin's egg blue tiles you can see behind the tub, and a general small compactness that fits the rest of the house. However, it should be noted that it is also very much still a work in progress as the floors are totally icky and the carnage that resulted from revealing our lovely wee tub is somewhat unsightly.

One of the great things about Martin, that makes him very different from me, is his willingness to make a mess (of course I don't always frame this quality in such a positive light, but in home repairs it is handy). It may have taken me all day to get that nasty tub surround out of there, carefully cutting away and lifting out one piece at a time. Martin however simply grabbed a crowbar and starting wrenching on it. And after defying a few laws of physics and breaking some bits into smaller pieces over his knee out he marched with the skeleton of our no-longer tub surround.

And we were right. There she was in all her four footed little glory. Our tub. Lemon yellow paint on the outside, contrasting nicely with the blue tiles (though really eventually the tub needs to be repainted) and relatively unscathed from Martin's destructo-adventure.

And while the resulting mess of plaster and the mismatched peeling floor tiles, and the odd yellow lino tacked to the walls under where the surround used to be are all highly unsightly, this tub makes me happy pretty much every single time I go into the bathroom. Which is a few times a day at least.

One further discovery that this adventure revealed was that those pretty blue tiles are in fact not actually "tiles" so much as plastic. This was a somewhat happy discovery as one of them went flying across the room as a particularly large bit of the surround was crowbared out of its position (we were prepaired for much shattering of tiles and instead it bounced!). But we were somewhat bummed to learn that our darling blue tiles we cheap plastic (vintage plastic though!). However once the initial disappointment wore off, they're growing on me again (and boy are they easy to clean!). So we're thinking we'll probably keep them. The next challenge though is to figure out what to do with part behind the tub-surround-that-was to match the tiles easily. But we'll come up with something. Actually Martin will, as he's got this crazy idea that he's also going to pull out all the floor tiles (which are stuck on with tar) and refinish the wood floors. After our first wood floor refinishing adventure I have declared this his own personal project and vowed to be out of town that weekend.