Rub a Dub, Dub, We Got Ourselves a Clawfoot Tub

"What's that?", you ask.  Just my hundred dollar claw-foot tub.  It may not look like much in these photos, but big things have been underway since August.  My mom found this tub in an antique store near her neck of the woods over a year ago.  We first saw the tub last Thanksgiving parked in her barn.  She'd stumbled upon the tub and knew it was a good deal for the condition it was in.  I'd told her to buy it, but had no idea how we would move such a heavy item across Texas and really didn't know when we'd have the funds to finance a bathroom redo.

Come this past August, almost a year after we'd first laid eyes on the tub, life persisted we redo the bathroom in the way that life often does.  You know, a leaking toilet leads to pulling up the vinyl flooring to properly clean up the leaked sewage, leads to, "since the toilet is pulled up, we might as well address the hole in the drywall that was hiding behind the tank, then covered over with three layers of wall paper," leads to "holy crap, are those termites marching up the studs?"  You know, life's little ways.  It was a blessing that I'd just graduated and didn't have a semester to pay and that I'd finally gotten a teaching job.  Spending before the job actually began was nerve wracking, but we kept the costs low by doing it ourselves.  It's taken time and we've got some little finishing touches to complete, but it's come together nicely.

First came the delivery of the tub via my angel of a mom.  Our first surprise was seeing the manufacturing mark and date on the underside of the tub.  Would you look at that?  The company name and date are displayed!  That truly excited me.  I was pleased to see "Made in America," fully spelled out, too.  It just looks so proud, written out fully, not "Made in the US," but America.  It's hard to find the quality of 1925 these days.

So many problems have exposed themselves within the near four years we've lived here.  We were such novice home buyers (no excuse, just the truth) that we didn't recognize the many problems that were masked over.  Apparently, neither did the man who'd done our inspection.  We thought our main focus would be updating a seventies style ranch...you know, cosmetic stuff.

Well, I'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

Treated studs, new tub, new walls, new all...It's a great improvement in space and so much bigger with the pocket door gone and a proper closing door instead of an arch that projected agonizing rays of light at the hubs wake up time of 4:45 a. m.;)