My bathroom needs some work, new tiles, new floor, new bathtub, etc. I was at a Home Expo yesterday and three booths were showing those "one-day cover up your old tub and tiles with acrylic stuff". It actually doesn't look too bad but at around $2500 it also wasn't anywhere near as cheap as I thought it would be.
Replacing the bathtub is a huge job and this is clearly much faster, but it isn't cheap and I guess there are other drawbacks. Any comments on this approach are greatly appreciated.
There are a number of such things some good and some rather poor. However they all suffer the problems of acrylic stuff. It is far less durable than traditional materials.
I would not make a decision on something that I might live with for 20 years or more on the bases of saving a few days of construction inconvenience.
This is an 18 foot attached house and the bathtub is embedded in three walls. I'm not capable of doing this.
My original plan was to gut the bathroom and put in a whirlpool tub of the same five foot size, maybe a bit wider than the current one. I even posted about it a few months back. But I hear that the nozzles and stuff are impossible to keep clean, especially if it is used as a shower most of the time. So then I figured that I'd just replace the tub, but that is a huge job with not much actual gain - thus the idea of dropping nice pretty acylic on top seemed like a decent compromise.
Especially since my economy looks a bit gloomy. I may end up with the time to try doing it myself.
I would think that it would cost less than $2500 to have the bub replaced. Even a cat iron tub costs about $300 to buy and I don't know how much to replace, but unless your tearing out walls or something custom, I don't think it would cost more than say $1500. The online estimator for my zip code put tub replacement at $1150. I'm thinking if having my tub replaced and doing the rest (floor and surround) myself and I don't thatink that will be too expensive.
If that's the case, you should just live with an ugly tub for a while. I guarantee you'll find something else to spend the money on.
My sister went this route and loves it.
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