Acrylic tub/shower combo reglazing in Fullerton

Got hired for a reglaze job out in Fullerton this past week on an acrylic tub and shower combination. Acrylic units are a little different than the fiberglass and porcelain stuff we work on most of the time. They feel similar from across the room, but the surface itself behaves a little differently, and you’ve got to know what you’re working with before you start spraying anything on it. Owner just wanted the unit brought back — she said it was looking dull, had a few small chips here and there, and she was tired of looking at it every morning.

Standard reglaze call on the surface of it. Until we got there.

When we arrived and started checking the unit out before we got going, we noticed pretty quick that this one had been painted at some point. Same story we run into a lot — somebody, somewhere along the line, decided they were going to fix it up themselves with a can of bathroom paint or one of those DIY kits from the hardware store. And the result was exactly what those jobs always look like after a year or two. Dull, blotchy in spots, and starting to come apart in others. The chips she’d noticed weren’t just chips in the acrylic, they were spots where the old paint had given up and started flaking off.

This kind of finding changes the order of operations. You can’t just lay a new coating over an old paint job. The old finish has to come off first or you’re just stacking another layer on top of an already failing one and waiting for the whole thing to peel later.

So the first step was sanding down the previous coating. Took some time on this one because the paint job was uneven — thick in some spots, thinner in others — and we had to work the whole unit down to a consistent surface across the walls and the tub. You’re not trying to remove every molecule of the old finish, but you’ve got to knock the gloss off, get past the loose stuff, and end up with a uniform matte surface that the new coating will bond to. Acrylic also has its own thing where you have to be careful not to sand too aggressively in any one spot, because the surface is softer than porcelain and you can dig into it if you’re not paying attention. Slow and even is the way.

Once the sanding was done we deep cleaned the entire unit. Walls, floor, the tub itself, every corner and seam. Sanding dust mixes with all the leftover soap residue, body oils, and whatever else has built up on a tub over the years, and all of that has to come off before any coating goes down. Skip the cleaning and you’re trapping contamination under the new finish, which is what causes the blotches and fish-eyes that you can never get rid of after the fact.

After cleaning, we filled the couple of small chips that the owner had pointed out. Nothing major, just minor surface damage that needed to be smoothed out and brought level with the rest of the unit so everything would spray uniform.

With the prep done, we masked the entire bathroom. Plastic and paper over the floor, the fixtures, the toilet, the vanity, the mirror, anything that wasn’t getting sprayed. Overspray is fine particles of coating that drift through the air and settle on every surface in the room if you let them, so masking properly is the difference between a clean job and a customer who’s stuck cleaning her bathroom for a week after we leave.

Then we set up our exhaust system. Pulls all the fumes out of the house during the spray instead of letting them drift through the rest of the home. We do this on every job, no exceptions. Refinishing chemicals are not something anybody wants lingering in their living room.

With everything prepped and ventilated, we sprayed our polyurethane coating across the whole unit. Acrylic takes the polyurethane really well when it’s been prepped right — bonds clean, cures hard, and finishes out smooth and glossy. We laid down our coats, let them cure, and pulled all the masking down.

When we walked the owner through it, the unit was bright, glossy, and looked nothing like what she’d been waking up to before we showed up. No more flaky paint, no more dull spots, no more visible chips. Just a clean acrylic tub and shower combo back to how it was supposed to look.

If you’ve got an acrylic tub or shower combo in your house that somebody painted at some point and now it’s looking rough, this is fixable. Doesn’t matter how bad the old paint job was — as long as the unit itself is still solid, we can strip it down and bring it back. Give us a call and we’ll come take a look.