Brooklyn Limestone

Fixing the Fixtures

It feels like a long, long time ago that we visited the house and found this bathroom staring back at us.

From very early on, we knew we wanted to keep whatever was possible to save. The clawfoot and the sink made it on the save list right away. I could pretend its my concern for being green or even my appreciation for the history of the home that drove that desire. While those two factors definitely counted, I think the biggest reason for keeping these items was that I liked them - they had personality and they fit the imaginery picture in my head of what the house would look like post-renovation.

We were originally going to keep it in the upstairs guest and/or potential limestoner offspring bathroom. After some thought, we realized a clawfoot tub isn't the most ideal place for drunken guests or children to bathe so the tub got moved to the downstairs parlor bathroom off the kitchen. It won't get used on a daily basis but will be handy for potential child/dog baths if the need should arise. The sink got reinstalled in the same place.

One of the first renovation foul ups we had in the demo days was that the clawfoot got thrown away accidently. Luckily, Mr. Limestone was making his rounds at the house that afternoon and spotted the tub peeking out of the dumpster! The tub got hauled out of the trash but had some signficant collateral damage.

And the sink was just a general mess from being abused for a 100 years.

After many months of waiting for its star treatment, we had the sink and tub re-surfaced this weekend. Sort of randomly, I found the website of Custom Spraying and Mr. L made the appointment. It was a pretty quick and painless process. They showed up on time, prepared the rooms by covering everything with brown paper and tape, did their spraying and were done in a few hours.


I've never had this done before so I wasn't sure what to expect. The owner, Jimmy, was very honest about the process and what it would/would not do. It would make it look a thousand times better but its not perfect nor would it last forever (he says once a decade should do it). It has to be treated slightly more delicately than you would treat something new. So no abrasive cleaners, no scraping the surface with metal, etc.. It seems pretty straightforward and easy to follow. He warned me that my sink had some pitting so I should be prepared for it. And while there is some tiny pits in the sink that I can feel with my fingers, I would never even have noticed if he didn't mention it. I didn't expect them to be like new, I just wanted them clean and useable and this did the trick.

One more thing off the to-do list, about a thousand things left to do.