Fixing Our Old Claw Foot Tub

We have an old claw foot tub in the bathroom. The house is old, the bathroom is small and the tub is also well probably ancient. The claw foot tub can be great to soak in but it can have many problems and headaches as well. It does not make the best shower!

We have had so many problems with this set-up, it seems impossible to have this many problems with such a heavy and sturdy tub. Some of our repairs are not the nicest looking or professional looking however we did it ourselves without access to proper parts. We have gone everywhere to find many of the parts we have needed for this tub and nobody, I mean no store that we have found can even order us some of the parts. The major home improvement stores have nothing for the tub, the local plumbing store has nothing and a kitchen and bath store has nothing. One guy sat down with us and looked through the whole parts manual looking for a couple of the parts and we could not find any. So the creative people we can be, we came up with other ways to "fix it."

The first problem we had was a leaky faucet. The tub is old and rusty in spots so the overflow is not the right size anymore. We accepted that and didn't fill the tub up too close to the overflow. The pipe to the overflow does not fit as well as it should. So now with the leaky faucet, we ended up with water all over the floor. The faucet would leak and drip all over the overflow and since the pipe was not as smug as it should be, the water came outside the tub around the overflow pipe. It then dripped onto the floor. Ok this didn't seem to be a big problem yet, we put a pie dish under the pipes to catch the water until we could get the parts. Just before we went for the parts, the water started leaking out of the inline for the hot water. More water on the floor!

So now we took the faucet apart, went to Home Depot and was told they have absolutely nothing that would work on that. We then went to Lowes and was told the same thing. They recommended a kitchen and bath store down the road. I thought you have got to be kidding me, at the moment we were looking for a rubber seal! So we went to the kitchen and bath store, the gentleman with all the patience in the world looked through thousands of pages trying to find any parts for us. He could not find any and said he could not order any, they do not make this anymore. We were a little frustrated but went home-frustrated at the tub not the nice gentleman.

I looked online for any parts and we decided to relieve the pressure. Putting a little hole in the bottom of the faucet, just under the hot spigot relieved most of the pressure and at least the inline wasn't leaking anymore. There was still a little leaking around the overflow but we used some RTV which is what is discolored in the picture. It helped to seal the pipe for the overflow and we stopped the leak. Who would have thought you would have to go through all this to fix a leaky faucet?

The other job we had to make due without the proper parts is the the ring for the shower curtain. It seems impossible to replace the ring that holds the shower curtain. Since the claw foot tub is not built into the wall, their is no normal shower curtain rod. We could not find the part for that either! So we had our measurements on how thick the ring was (it had snapped apart on us one day) and off to the major home improvement stores we go. We were told that there was nothing they could do for us but I had a plan. If we found a small connector that was hollow, we could use it to reconnect the broken ends. Yes it is sad we had to do it this way, but it is what it is. We found a piece of brass pipe that was a perfect fit and had to connect the two ends inside the brass connector as shown in the picture. We used two screws to ensure they would stay in place.

This was the beginning of our headaches with this tub!