Guest Bath

I spent Friday evening browsing Lowes (my third home) for a bathtub and looking at shower surround material.

For the tub, I decided on an American Standard Princeton Premium Bathtub.  It's light weight steel and porcelain but also insulated by a 1/4" layer of molded platstic....or some such stuff.  A true cast iron tub would have been too impractical in terms of cost and my ability to manhandle it into place.  This tub was only about 100lbs and pretty manageable.

As far as the surround, I'm torn between just doing a prefabricated shower surround in lieu of the more time consuming but impressive backer board/ceramic tile combination.  I still haven't made up my mind but given it's the guest bath and thus not subject to high usage and related wear and tear, I'm leaning towards the simplicity of the prefabricated variety.  Still looking into that.

I picked the tub up on Saturday and set about installing it.

Installation, in theory, is pretty easy.....
The tub itself just sits on the floor with, according to the instructions, a couple of nail heads over the outside lip to hold it in place. 

On the other hand.....
The drain setup, while simple in theory, was proving to be a pain in the butt! 

The first kit was all brass and had all the right parts however, after messing with it for over an hour I finally figured out that the tub, being insulated, was too thick for the brass drain fitting that goes through the floor of the tub.  I could not get it to mate up with the corresponding fitting under the tub.

Grrrr.... I returned the brass kit to Lowes and bought the $30 cheaper plastic kit which mated up like a charm.  Since I still had a previous brass pipe connector on hand from the old tub, I used that part as it mated up quite well with the copper drain pipes in the ground.

With the tub in place, I was able to accurately measure for the height of the shower head and get that component installed.  That last little bit formally completes all of the plumbing that needed to be in place before the sheetrock could go up.

Will have to make a decision on the surround before the sheetrock can happen.

Decisions, decisions!