Baby Whale All Grown Up

Heeheeheeheeeeeeeeeee! That's the sound of me being giddy. The tub? It is painted!

I couldn't find the "Canvas White" spray paint I wanted in any of the local stores and ended up having to order it online in a 6-pack (from Aubuchon Hardware). It arrived on Friday, and automatically Darwin and I both knew what we'd be doing Saturday, whether we liked it or not.

The color of the cap was just slightly lighter than the cap of the Almond spray paint.



I was anxious (I'll wait while you recover from the shock), but it turned out fine. Canvas White is the exact color we needed, and before it's over I think we'll need all six cans.

"Before it's over?" you say ... "I thought you were finished."

Yeah, well "finished" is a flexible term around here. The tub itself is pretty much finished, though we'll probably do one more coat.

Two out of four claw feet are primed, though OF COURSE we ran out of primer. The last two feet need to be buffed with a wire brush and washed to get any loose rust-dust off.

While dealing with the feet, D noticed two are marked 5 1/4 on the back, and two are marked 6. They are two different heights. We assume the shorter feet were intended to go toward the faucet end of the tub to help it drain better. But we are considering using the tall feet on the same side of the tub to help offset the slant in the bathroom floor. Maybe this is the intended purpose after all? Or maybe there were multiple purposes.

The feet look worlds universes better now that they're not all gunked with rust and old toxic paint. Ooh, so pretty.



And now for the moment you've been waiting for, the money shot:



Oops, wrong money shot. :) That's Darwin finishing up taping around the edge of the tub, which he wisely insisted we do. Lest anyone think I did nothing, I taped most of the edge. Yeah, and I scraped the rest of the paint off the feet while Darwin spray-painted the tub. I also spray painted some of the second coat.

So I'm not useless, even though I am so pathetic that I'm even bad at spray painting. And my forearm was sore the next day from holding down that stupid little button.

Anyway, I will now distract you with pictures so you will forget all about what I just said:



Is that not the perfect color? I love you, Canvas White.

Baby Whale Gets a Makeover

With all the paint finally scraped off, the rust ground off, and the residue washed off, the mottled gray hide of the clawfoot tub reminds me of a baby whale. Awww, it's so cute and harmless now that all the hard work is done.



It has been a long saga to get to this point. In December 2004, we brought it home. It sat out in the workshop untouched - except for a few times when I went and sat in it to daydream ( Don't judge me!). Then we started the bathroom renovation, and when the demo neared completion, I realized that duh - we had to get the tub ready to go in there. In June 2006 we started scraping it. We did that a couple of different days in June, but then the Summer of Stagnation (hereafter referred to as SOS) set in, and we got exactly 0.0001% of our planned work done.

I've been perusing the archives, and this is the first weekend in three weeks that we've actually accomplished something, and the first time in TWO MONTHS that we've made progress on the bathroom. Yeah, we've had legitimate excuses, but still - yikes!

The long SOS makes our accomplishments this weekend feel like superhero stuff. We finished scraping the tub and worked on scraping the bed. Then Darwin used the handy-dandy wire brush attachment for the drill to get rid of a bit of rust on the unpainted side of the tub and some uneven paint scraps left under the rim. He washed the tub and blow-dried it with his leaf blower, which chased the water around and around the rim of the tub. Then we taped up the tub openings with brown paper.

Finally, the moment! We spray-painted the exterior of the tub with white Rustoleum clean metal primer. It looked so crisp and white and not covered with globs of crackled, peeling lead paint! Yes!

Then, of course, we ran out of spray primer. But that can't keep me down. We're at the easy part now.

So today - Lowe's. We need more spray primer, and I want to find a top coat that's not quite so bright white. I saw a color called Canvas (I think) online, but Darwin didn't see it at Lowe's when he bought the spray primer. If they don't have it, there's a Home Depot I can try, too.

Okay, without further ado - the photos:

Before:




The only damper on my joy is that I hoped to have the tub finished by its 75th birthday. I had it in my head the birthday was September 17, 1931, but then we flipped it over Saturday and saw that the date is September 7. Oops, just missed it. Sorry, baby whale. Consider this your belated birthday celebration.

Forever the Optimist

We tackled the tub on Saturday before the 3-day-long Father's Day festivities commenced. As always, I hoped the chemical stripper would be a miracle cure, that the paint would cower at the sight of it and yield easily under the might of our scrapers.

As always, things happened a little differently. Darwin bought a "semi-paste" stripper that turned out to be more like a liquid. We had to prop the tub up on a cinder block and a rusty old chair to make it level, so the stripper wouldn't run off. Our first layer of stripper wasn't thick enough, so it barely made a dent in the paint. The next time we poured it on super thick. That - with much vigorous scraping - did the job. Well, most of the job.

The bottom layer of gooey paint is still holding on for dear life. We finally decided to try priming one little spot to see if the paint remnants would show. Yep, they did.

So we've got at least another day of work to go on this beast. We think maybe the wire brush and/or a palm sander will take off the rest or at least get it smooth enough to paint. At this point, I am caring less and less about having a smooth exterior. I just want to get the thing painted so I can move on to something else!

As for the rest of the weekend, we had dinner with Darwin's family on Saturday night, and then Sunday we left for a Lambert Family Pilgrimage to south Alabama. We trekked all over Washington and Mobile counties looking for cemeteries where my ancestors are buried and land my ancestors owned.

We went to Old Escatawpa Cemetery, hidden down a dirt road back in the woods, where my great-great grandfather, great-great-great grandfather, great-great-great grandmother and great-great-great-great grandfather are buried. I was expecting some sort of deep, gut-feeling connection to the place, but it didn't come. I guess seeing their graves doesn't change the fact that we know virtually nothing about that side of the family.



The stories my dad told on the way were more meaningful to me. Like the ones about the great-grandmother I barely knew. She'd buy an old house in Mobile, fix it up, rent out the top floor, then sell it and buy another old house and do the same thing all over again.

Makes me wish I'd taken time to know her before she died a few years ago. We could've had a lot in common.

I Just Want to Take a Bath

If we're going to get the master bathroom functioning while Darwin's off the week of 4th of July, that means we have a lot of prep work to do. For my part, I was determined to scrape and paint the clawfoot tub this weekend.

I researched it first on Houseblogs.net because I knew I'd read about other folks doing this. I came up with this practical advice from John at The Devil Queen. He gimped up his hand while going at his tub with a drill and wire brush grinding attachment. I planned to tackle my tub the same way, only I hoped without the gimping.

Darwin and my dad lugged the tub out of the shed where it's been hanging out since December 2004 and into a shady spot on the grass, the better for me to contaminate nature with lead paint.

On one side the tub appeared to have two layers of paint (we discovered later it was actually three layers), the top one dirty and so dry and cracked I could brush much of it off with my hand. The other side of the tub had no paint at all, just a little rust.

I started working on it with two different wire brush attachments, one a flat disk and the other a cup shape. Both worked fine at getting off the loose top layer and any already-exposed rust.

But when the second layer of paint saw the wire brush coming, it simply yawned and went back to playing solitaire. The brush had no effect whatsoever.

Meanwhile, Darwin was standing around watching me, interjecting the occasional word of advice, his fingers twitching (while I gave him my patented Death Glare). It makes him insane when I tackle a project on my own because he is convinced he could do it better. Maybe so, probably so. But just back off, okay?

*SIGH*

Then he actually made himself useful by taking the corroded old chrome hardware off the tub. I won't tell you what short and curly parts of another human he found in the drain. Blechhcchhelaccchhhh. Shudder.

Okay. So then he went and found a scraper and started working on the second layer of off white paint and the old beige paint underneath it. The scraping worked, but it took a lot of brute strength, which I'm sorely lacking.

So here we were again, Darwin doing all the work while I was standing by with my drill and grinding attachments feeling useless.

Well not entirely. I did use the drill to work on smoothing the rusted areas.

Then Darwin got a blister on his hand from all the scraping and had to quit. I tried it, but all I could manage was to make a few chips in the paint when I wielded the scraper pickax style. The paint is hard to scrape because it's on slightly bumpy metal, which doesn't let the scraper slide along.

So I decided to bust out the trusty heat gun. But even the heat gun proved no match for that dastardly paint. The off white layer didn't budge at all, and the bottom beige layer only got gummy and smeared everywhere.

In the end, we had to give up on my plans to get the tub fully scraped and at least primed. We decided the only thing left to try is chemical stripper, which we've never used before. Our local hardware store was already closed by then (why would a hardware store close at noon on Saturday, I ask you?), so the project had to be discontinued until we could make our next trip to Evil Empire (aka Lowe's).

But I wonder if this stubborn (or as we say in Alabama, "hardheaded") paint is the dreaded milk paint I've heard so much about. If so, will even chemicals phase its diamond hide?

Darn you, tub. I thought at least this part of the bathroom project was going to be easy.

Before	During	After

The one bit of good news for the day was that we finally found the date mark on the bottom of the tub. 9-7-1931. Our new goal is to have this tub in place and fully functioning by it's 75th birthday.

Patchwork

Our burst of work on the bathroom project this weekend motivated me to finally order our shower enclosure and other plumbing goodies from Vintage Tub and Bath.

We got the Strom Plumbing faucet and shower enclosure with English telephone hand shower, plus Strom plumbing supply lines with cut-off valves, and a Strom plumbing drain with a rubber stopper on a chain.



All are finished in polished nickel because I've bought some old nickel-plated bathroom accessories from eBay. The towel bar even exactly matches the holes/paint circles in the beadboard from where the old towel bar was. Of course, our tub and towel bar will go all the way on the other side of the room from there, but it feels serendipitous anyway.

Plus, the polished nickel is one of the cheaper options. Hurray for cheaper!

I also went ahead and ordered one of those jumbo 180 by 70-inch shower curtains designed for a clawfoot tub and some of those adorable roller ball shower curtain rings. What can I say? Once I start buying, I can't seem to stop.

Anyway, the stuff is coming from two different places. The smaller stuff is coming from Pennsylvania and is supposed to be here in a couple of days. The shower enclosure is coming from California and won't be here for two weeks or so. I hope it gets here by 4th of July, when Darwin has a week off work. That would be the perfect time to get the plumbing done in the bathroom.

Before he does that, though, the wood floor needs some repair. There are a few holes from the two previous bathtub locations, but the worst spot is around the former toilet.



That's where the tub will go. First, Darwin has to move the plumbing for the toilet to the opposite side of the room. Then we have to replace the damaged wood, possibly with boards from the attic floor, possibly with new.

It will be in the corner, mostly hidden under the clawfoot tub. We don't want it to look crazy, but I hate to waste old wood on a spot that won't be seen. Since we're repainting the wood floor, we wouldn't have to worry about color matching.

Also, there are other spots in the floor that need patching, most notably the 4 by 12-inch or so hole where the old tub drain ran. And I think there are a couple of old patch jobs, too.

This room has been transformed many times, and the whole thing is a patchwork of change overlapping change. It will never be perfect, it has a few scars, but that's okay with me. If I wanted a brand new perfect house, I'd buy a McMansion (or in our case, a McShack).

I seem to recall a pre-teen game of Masch predicting I would live in a cottage, marry Jonathan Brandis (R.I.P.), drive a skateboard, and have 15 kids. Hey, one out of four ain't bad.

Happy Face

Look what was lurking under the bathroom cabinets ...



AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!! Actually, I think he's sort of cute, but like the cartoon ghosts hanging around in the castles in Mario Brothers games, he's probably got a dark side, too.

As you can see, we now know where the tub was originally. These holes indicate where the hot and cold lines and the drain were (notice the odd offset ... I found a set of pipes with the same offset at Vintage Plumbing, so it's not just a case of bad measuring). Also, on the wall behind the tub are the ghosts of two shelves, and on the wall beside the tub are two round spots that probably indicate where a towel bar was (see pic below with the pink arrows).

Based on this new evidence, our plan is to install the clawfoot tub in its original location. Hey, the holes are already there, so why not? This way, the sink will now be directly across from the toilet and closer to natural light to allow for my beautifying treatments (see the new shoebox arrangement below).

I'm still debating what to do about the sink. We might stick with a pedestal or do a sink-in-old-dresser deal, maybe with a marble top. Not sure. I hoped that when we got the whole bathroom demo'ed and cleared of debris, the right solution would just come to me. So far, nada.

Anyway, I'm happy it's done.



P.S. Check out the cool paper lining the bathroom drawers. Sadly, it is water damaged.

The Room of Requirement

Today I was playing around with the arrangement of objects in our bathroom on HGTV's room layout tool, and I discovered something disturbing.

If we do everything I planned on my old graph paper sketch, there will be no place for a towel bar!

This is very distressing because I am a person who requires a towel bar. I am a person who requires everything to be easily in reach and who is deeply annoyed by inconvenience. Let's face it - I'm a primadonna.

This towel bar discovery is making me a little nervous. People keep trying to tell me clawfoot tubs are no fun to take a shower in because you have nowhere to set your stuff, and the shower curtains blow in on you.

This will be our main shower in the house. We will use it every day. Are we going to regret this?

Bathroom Resolutions

The clawfoot tub is home! My dad picked it up for us and brought it to our house. It is now sitting in the newly cleaned-out storage building, just waiting till we can get the time to actually work on the bathroom.

It's looking like the tub will be waiting quite a while.



I've been trying to come up with a realistic time frame for the work on the house. So far, I've got this: We'll finish the kitchen this year (2005) and the bathroom next year (2006). For a person who likes instant gratification (me), that sounds like a loooooong time to wait. But I would rather wait and have it right than do a quickie job and be unhappy with the results.

One issue with the bathroom is the layout. We haven't quite figured out where we want what to go. I've drawn numerous potential layouts on graph paper, napkins, scraps - anything lying around handy. But nothing has felt just right yet.

We know we'll be expanding the bathroom into the 6 x 4.5-foot nook in the hallway outside the bathroom. But what we'll be doing with that space is still a matter of debate. I had the idea recently that we could make it into a walk-in closet instead of the walk-in shower we had originally planned. Then we could make the clawfoot tub into a shower.

But there are issues with having only a clawfoot tub for a shower ... like where do you set all your washing gadgetry like shampoo, razor and three different scents of shower gel? And what happens when we're old (in 30 years) and can't hike our arthritic legs up over the edge?

The main benefit of the walk-in idea is that it would allow us to rip out the closets that were added into the master bedroom in the '70s. These added-in closets change the shape of the room, take up valuable wallspace and have small amounts of usable space anyway. But demolishing these enormous structures that stretch all the way to the 12-foot ceilings adds more work onto our already-large pile.

At this rate, we'll be lucky if we can decide what to DO with the bathroom by next year.