Welcome to Adamov Reglazing, your trusted partner for bathtub reglazing and cabinet refinishing services in Southern California. We proudly serve residential and commercial clients across multiple locations, helping you revitalize your bathrooms and kitchens with cost-effective, professional solutions.
Here’s a cast iron tub reglazing project we recently completed in Rancho Mirage, and this one’s a little different because we weren’t the first ones to refinish it. The tub had been reglazed several years back by another company, but somewhere along the line that finish started peeling. When a previous reglaze fails like this, the homeowner usually assumes reglazing just doesn’t work — but that’s not the case. A reglaze done right and cared for right lasts. When one peels, there’s almost always a reason, and finding that reason is the first part of the job.
In this case, the most likely culprit was a bath mat with suction cups. I see it all the time. Those suction cups grab onto the coating, and every time the mat gets pulled up, it tugs on the finish. Do that day after day and eventually the coating starts lifting, and once it lets go in one spot it spreads from there. It doesn’t matter how good the original reglaze was — a suction-cup mat will work it loose over time. So part of what the homeowner is paying for is knowing that going forward, this tub needs a different kind of mat, one without suction cups, or any finish will eventually have the same fight on its hands.
Now to the work. The key with redoing a failed reglaze is that you can’t just spray over the old coating — you have to deal with what’s already there. We started by removing the old caulking all the way around the tub, then sanding down the previous coating. Sanding that old finish down does two things: it takes off the failing, peeling layer, and it knocks the surface back so the new coating has something solid to grab. Skip that and you’re just stacking a new finish on top of a failing one, and it’ll peel right back off. This is a cast iron tub, so underneath that old coating is a porcelain enamel surface over a heavy cast iron body — a substrate that lasts generations when it’s prepped and refinished properly.
After the old coating was sanded down, we did a deep cleaning inside and out. Cleaning the inside is obvious, but the outside of the tub matters too for a complete, uniform finish. Every bit of soap scum, grime, and residue came off so there was nothing left to interfere with the bond. Then we ran new caulking all the way around the tub, both to seal it against water and to give it a clean, finished edge.
With the prep done, we masked the whole room — and on this job that included the countertop and the walls along with the floor and fixtures. Reglazing throws a fine overspray that drifts onto every nearby surface, so anything we didn’t want coated got taped and covered first.
Then we sprayed our polyurethane bright white finish. Polyurethane is a tough, durable coating, and on a job like this — where the last finish failed — durability is exactly the point. The result was excellent. The tub came out shiny, bright white, and feeling completely fresh, with no trace of the old peeling finish anywhere. The customer was extremely satisfied, and now that the tub’s been properly stripped, prepped, and refinished — and the suction-cup mat is gone for good — this finish is set up to last.
This job was in Rancho Mirage, but we handle porcelain tub refinishing and cast iron tub reglazing all over Riverside, San Bernardino, and Orange County. We get a lot of calls to redo reglazing that another company did and that didn’t hold up, and the fix almost always comes down to proper prep and knowing what caused the failure in the first place. We give honest estimates and we’ll always tell you straight what went wrong and what it’ll take to make it right.
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