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.
Stains on a porcelain tub are one of those things that sneak up on people. You don’t notice them appearing — you just look down one day and realize the bottom of the tub doesn’t look the way it used to. Sometimes it’s from years of using harsh cleaning chemicals that slowly etch into the porcelain. Sometimes it’s hair dye, which is one of the most stubborn things you can get on a tub surface. Sometimes it’s a combination, layered up over time, until the bottom of the tub has a permanent shadow that no amount of scrubbing is going to lift.
That was the situation with this Newport Beach tub. The customer had been living with the staining for a while and had finally decided she was done trying to clean it off. By the time we got out there, she’d already tried the usual approaches — every household cleaner, a few specialty products, some hopeful elbow grease — and nothing was making real progress. Which makes sense, because once a stain has actually penetrated the porcelain surface, it stops being a cleaning problem and becomes a bathtub refinishing one.
We handle tub reglazing jobs like this throughout Orange County, and stained porcelain is one of the most common issues that brings people to us. Here’s how this particular job went.
Old caulking came out first. Same as every tub job. Aged caulk is brittle, pulled away from the edges, and impossible to lay a new finish over. Got it all out cleanly and moved on.
The deep cleaning is where this particular tub took some extra care. With stained porcelain, a standard cleaning gets you part of the way there but doesn’t address what’s actually happening down at the surface level. The staining isn’t just sitting on top of the porcelain — it’s worked its way into it. So for a tub like this, we sometimes step up the prep with an etching acid. That sounds dramatic but it’s a controlled, deliberate part of the process when the situation calls for it. The acid lightly etches the porcelain surface, which does two things at once: it lifts and neutralizes a lot of the staining that won’t come off with conventional cleaning, and it creates a microscopically rougher surface for the new coating to grip into. We don’t use it on every tub. Plenty of tubs don’t need it. But on a stained surface like this one, it’s part of what makes the difference between a bathtub refinishing job that buries the problem and one that actually starts from a clean foundation.
After the etch and the cleaning, the tub was ready for repair work. There were some chips and small holes on the bottom — the kind of damage that builds up on any tub over decades of use, especially around the drain area where things tend to get dropped. We filled each one, smoothing the material flush with the surrounding surface, and worked them down until the bottom of the tub was completely flat. Flat surface is a big deal here. Any small dip or bump on a tub floor catches your eye under a fresh coat of bright white, especially in good light. So we took our time with this and got it level.
Fresh caulking went on around the perimeter where the tub meets the wall. Standard step for us before the spray — caulk gets coated along with the tub, the seam disappears into the finish, and the whole transition between the tub and the surround comes out looking clean.
Masking was next. Floor, vanity, toilet, mirror, fixtures, the whole bathroom under plastic and paper. Ventilation went in to keep the air clear during the spray. With the bathroom buttoned up, the spray itself was straightforward. Bright white coating, multiple coats, even and slow, with full cure time before anything got touched.
The reveal on a job like this is genuinely satisfying. The customer had been looking at that stained bottom for years, and what she got back was a tub with a clean, glossy, uniformly bright white surface. No more shadow on the floor of the tub. No more spots where the staining used to show through. Just a smooth, even finish from end to end, like the tub had never been stained in the first place.
That’s the thing about porcelain staining — it feels permanent because it can’t be cleaned off, but it’s not actually permanent. It’s just past the point where cleaning is the right tool for the job. Proper tub reglazing, with the right prep underneath, gives you a fresh start on a tub that’s otherwise still in good shape. No tear-out, no plumbing, no construction. Just a clean surface again.
If your tub is dealing with hair dye stains, chemical etching, or some other discoloration that won’t come off no matter what you try, we’d be glad to take a look. We serve homeowners across Orange County with tub reglazing and bathtub refinishing, and there’s a real chance your tub is still solid underneath and just needs the surface taken care of properly.
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