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.
Wrapped up a fiberglass shower job in Santa Ana last week that had a little bit of everything going on. Not the worst we’ve ever seen, but enough little problems stacked together that the homeowner had been putting it off for a while, hoping it would somehow get better on its own. It never does.
The shower was a standard fiberglass step-in unit, probably original to the house, and three main things were wrong with it. First, there was a thick line of old silicone running down one side where a shower frame used to be mounted. Someone had pulled the frame off at some point but never properly removed the silicone underneath, so it was sitting there like a rubbery scar across the wall. Second, there were a couple of chips down on the floor of the shower, the kind you get when something heavy gets dropped or when the substrate underneath starts giving up. And third, there were two cracks running along the sides.
That third one is worth explaining because we see it constantly. Fiberglass cracks on the side walls of a shower almost always come from the same thing: somebody slips a little while showering and catches themselves with a foot or a knee against the side. Fiberglass flexes, but it doesn’t flex forever. After enough years and enough little impacts, you get hairline cracks that slowly open up. People assume it’s a manufacturing defect or that the shower was installed wrong. Most of the time it’s just normal use catching up with normal materials. This is one of the most common reasons we get called for fiberglass tub reglazing and shower repair in Orange County.
We started on the silicone. That stuff doesn’t come off easily once it’s been baked in by years of hot showers. We scraped it carefully with a plastic blade so we wouldn’t gouge the fiberglass underneath, then went over the area with a solvent to dissolve what was left. Patience matters here. Rush this step and you’ll either damage the substrate or leave residue behind, and the new coating won’t bond properly to either one.
Next was the deep cleaning. This shower had the textured non-slip pattern molded into the floor, which is great for traction but a nightmare for cleanliness. All those little grooves trap soap scum, dirt, and over time you get that gray-green buildup that nothing seems to touch. We worked the entire bottom with a stiff brush and our heavy-duty cleaner, scrubbing section by section until the texture was actually visible again instead of being filled in with grime.
Then we moved to the structural repairs. The two side cracks got opened up slightly so the filler could get inside them, not just bridge over the top. We used a fiberglass-compatible filler, packed it into the cracks, let it cure, and sanded it flush. Same process on the floor chips. This part of fiberglass repair in Orange County matters more than the spraying does, honestly. Anyone can spray a coat of paint. Doing the prep and the structural work right is what separates a job that lasts ten years from one that fails in eight months.
After repairs, we masked off the walls outside the shower, the floor of the bathroom, and the door frame. Ran ventilation out a window. Then we sprayed our bright white industrial coating in even passes, three coats total, letting each one set before going back over.
By the next morning the shower was usable again, and it looked like a different unit. Smooth surface, no visible cracks, no silicone scar, no green buildup in the texture.
For more information you check out our Blog or FAQ.
