Saturday, May 24, 2008

Clipping File - The Claw Foot Bath Tub




I have been renovating a bathroom for a couple of years. Don't ask. So I have a clipping file of bathrooms.
We live in an old house, and the bathroom has a small foot print, and there is no room to expand it. So instead of trying to do some depraved spa look we decided to update and clean it up, but still keep the feeling of this old dump.
We also are doing the work ourselves, except for one thing, which was to have new pipes put in. We are on the hideous B word budget, so we are not doing a complete gut job. We managed to keep our tub and the toilet and the walls and the ceiling. The walls were covered with plastic paneling and wood paneling around the tub. The ceiling had acoustic tiles. I stripped all that off to find beautiful old cypress wood paneling on both walls and ceiling, using horizontal boards. It's in pretty good shabby shape. I painted it all white.
We put in a double sink. The hubs made the vanity base, very simple wood, with 4 big chunky legs. I white washed and waxed it. The fixtures throughout are oil rubbed bronze.
There are some nice accessories, a train rack, an old cabinet, frame less oval mirrors, a new light fixture, vintage apothecary jars, an old clock...
The floor is white tile, and it remains. The hubs added tile where the cheap bastards didn't put any under the old sink vanity (which we discovered when we took it out). Again, we did not want to do a gut job. We managed to match the tiles pretty good with the cheapest thing from Lowes.
Still to do: tile tub surround with white subway tile; open up a small window that is over the tub that was boarded up (this means cutting the siding on the outside of the house and building a custom window); scraping and painting an existing built in cupboard unit (and adding new hardware); installing the cutest mini ceiling fan (we already installed the coolest slim heater from Europe - it's looks like a huge white ceramic tile so it mounts flat on the wall); have the tub resurfaced and add all oil rub bronze fixtures.
The laundry room adjoins, so that will be painted, and the floor tiled, and a french doors installed (to replace an ugly metal door that looks onto the patio); install the same ceiling fan as we are using in the bath; install a tank less water heater.
The ceiling in the bathroom has been sanded and stripped and painted, but still vestiges of glue spots remain from the acoustic tile horror show. We found fake tin ceiling tiles that we are going to use, and will use them in the laundry room area too.
We are never bored for lack of something to do.
Oh, we don't have a claw foot tub. I wish we did. But I like the feeling of bathrooms in the photos in the clipping file. If you have an old claw foot tub, keep it and resurface it and get new fixtures for it.

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