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 t all happened in November of 2005.
 A few months into our Australian adventure, Ella and I were shopping for our couch. We were walking along and passed a bathroom accessories store. They had big clawfoot bathtubs and Ella suggested we get one. I had already been thinking the same thing, but I asked her why. She responded, so that we have somewhere to cuddle up and read books. I thought that was a FABULOUS idea! I harken back to my grade-school days... Miss Kamps had an idea to reward her students. She put a brightly painted claw-foot bathtub in the back and filled it with pillows. If you finished your work early, or did something special (A+, etc.) she would reward you by letting you sit in the bathtub and read a book. I was always rather slow about finishing my work and I never really cared too much about my grades, so almost never got to read in the tub. So, here I am, nearly 25 years later, and my girlfriend suggests we get a bathtub to read in. Eh... works for me. We went inside and asked about how much it was... $1200. A bit out of our price range, especially for something as whimsical as a bathtub reading nook. I kind of put it out of my mind and went back to looking for couches. About a week later, someone was rummaging through a "Trader". It's the Aussie equivalent of the Sunday Shopper or the Sunday Classifieds. I mentioned that I was looking for a tub and the paper was handed over. I found a couple of different claw foot bathtubs for under $200. The only problem... transportation. So I called up Lee. Since Lee runs a transport company, he has plenty of access to people with trucks. Originally he said he was going to haul it himself, but he's just so busy that it never happened. So he mentioned a couple of people and I ended up having Tony help me (the guy I helped move refrigerators a few months back.) Tony was really great, he went out, picked it up, brought it right to my door and helped me move it inside. It's a good think he helped me, because as I found out a couple days ago when I was adjusting the placement in the apartment, Ella can't lift even one end of it.  At any rate, it was here. I was mildly disappointed that it wasn't in prestine condition, since I had talked to a woman on the phone and she said it was perfect. It had a number of chips in the enamal, serious rust stains, thick rust on the feet, lots of damage to the interior bottom... I think someone was using it as a clay dump for pottery!Once I got it inside, I immediately started cleaning it, but soon realized that I was going to need something stronger than Ajax liquid cleaner. The next day I journeyed to the hardware store and picked up some CLR, some hydrochloric acid, a wire brush, some steel wool, and a wire wheel for my drill. Let me tell you, that sped things up considerably. I used the hydrochloric acid and steel wool on the interior of the bathtub, using the wire wheel for the more difficult spots. I made sure to wear thick gloves. I dumped the feet of the tub into a bucket of CLR and let it sit. Every once in a while I would stick my gloved hand in and stir the water a bit... but mainly I just let the product do it's work. After about 24 hours, I had burned them down to a beautiful stripped cast iron... hardly a sign of rust. A bit of wire brush and everything was shiny and smooth.  The only bad part about the feet was the mixing... you see, I was intermittantly doing other things, like watching television or movies. So I'd stir the bucket and without taking the glove off my hand, I'd sit down and watch 15 mintues of television... not realizing that there was a hole in the glove and that it wasn't sweat from my hand that was making the interior slippery, but that my skin was disolving. After about an hour, my hand started to itch really bad, so I pulled off the glove to scratch it and found my poor hand swollen and red. Let this be a lesson to you kids! Make sure your glove isn't defective or this happens!Luckily I did this at the beginning of my weekend, so when it came time to tattoo again, my hand was nearly healed.  After I had everything either stripped or sufficiently cleaned and roughed up, I enameled the interior of the tub. I had the paint store specially mix me some bathtub enamal to match my walls. Each coat took roughly 16 hours to properly cure so that I could recoat. Whoo-boy did Ella and I enjoy the fumes in our tiny apartment! On top of everything else, one of the days was that unbearably hot one (104°F!) so we didn't even want to leave for fresh air! We had the windows open, but that only does so much. After much fun hallucinations, we finally finished though, three coats and three days later. Then it was time to paint the bottom. That was easy enough. I just used some left-over latex from the walls... it went quick. Three coats in three hours... much better than the enamal. In the process I even detailed the feet. They came out looking surprisingly nice. Finally I had it all put together. Phase one of our project is completed. Now on to part two... 
Now the original idea was to just put a bunch of throw pillows in the tub... but we all know that I can't do anything the easy way. It has to be overly creative or it just isn't me. So we decided to make a bubble bath. The plan originally was to find a cushion for the bottom from an outdoor chaise lounge and then find some round blue pillows to put on top. That turned out to be a problem. We couldn't find cushions in the colors we wanted at all and the cost on throw pillows was just astronomical for the number we'd need. Not to mention, we couldn't find exactly what we wanted for pillows anyway. Hence, we must MAKE everything we need.The first problem was finding a cloth. In Wisconsin, I just would have gone to Wal-Mart and found everything I needed in one trip. Not here. None of the department stores had any sort of crafting departments and it took forever to find a sewing store. We first bought plain blue cloth, but it was determined that the bubble bath would look better if it had white bubbles... especially since we now had a black couch instead of a blue one. Originally we were going to hand sew all the pillows. We decided, after about 20 minutes of bad stitching and a little cursing, this was a poor idea. Back to the sewing shop and we purchased a sewing machine (after a little shopping around at some other locations.) 
I'm going to take this moment to mention how ridiculously unkempt the Spotlight sewing shop is. I'm used to Wal-Mart or Hobby Lobby, or Michaels... where everything is practically sterile... it's all put away neatly and other than the aisle that some distracted mother allowed her 3 year old to completely demolish, it's always clean and tidy and even that aisle is soon put back into order. The entirety of Spotlight looks like that demolished aisle... and it's not just on the one day we happened in... no... we've been back many times for supplies and it is ALWAYS in a state of disarray. It's awful. Everything is thrown about willy-nilly, the departments not only blur together, but have little to no logic in their set-up, and I don't think the floor had been cleaned in weeks. I would have practically killed for a Michaels. At any rate, we got a nice machine and some white cloth with a pretty design in it. I designed a pattern on Corel Draw so that we could make nice little balls. We didn't want to be sewing forever, so we did baseball shapes instead of beachball shapes. As a result, some of the first designs were a bit off and came out kind of square, but subsequent designs came out more spherical. They'd be perfect if we could have overstuffed them, but we wanted them to be soft... so they're still a tiny bit square, but they more than do the job.Out of the blue cloth that we got originally, I made a mat for the bottom. The original design was for the mat to run all the way up the back, but after testing it out, we discovered that it slid around too much and that the straps that would be needed to hold it in place would ruin the aesthetics... plus it didn't really add much to the comfort of the lounge... so we shortened it to just the bottom of the tub. 
After much cutting, sewing, stuffing, stitching, (more cutting, sewing, stuffing, and stitching... and yet MORE cutting sewing, stuffing and stitching!) we finally finished it... Our bubble bath, bathtub lounge... or as Ella likes to call it, "The most comfortable ball pit EVER!"It may look like I'm doing most of the work, and to be fair, I probably did... that's normal for me... When everyone else takes a break, I'm still pounding away. That isn't to say that Ella didn't do her fair share. She was great about going to get supplies, helping with cutting, stuffing, and even a bit of stitching, plus she made sure that she kept me fed. She was always taking care of me, because let's face it, when I'm in that mood I forget to take care of myself. I've gone days without eating or sleeping just because I'm into a project. She makes sure that I at least have good food in me. We're a good team. (Then again, if she didn't spend so much time in the bars, she might have the coordination to help do some sewing!)  So that's my big secret project. Sorry it couldn't be something more exciting, but I'm limited on space and materials. Now, off to build that space shuttle out of household appliances. |
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