Two types of bath tub

There are many types of bath tub, and many choices if you are in the market for a tub to fit into your decorating scheme, your mood, or your parameters of space and budget. 

One of the most interesting types of bath tub is a custom tub made from very cheap materials and very experienced and skillful, and likely for those reasons expensive, labor. The concrete tub can be elegant and large, and is one of the new types of tub offered by builders and architects in very modern and upscale living space in places where design is avant garde, like San Francisco and New York. The kind of concrete we are used to seeing is rough, dull, and not attractive, like that used in concrete blocks or sidewalks.

But it is possible to make concrete look like granite that has been polished, or soap stone, by those who are skilled in the craft of making the surface of the material look special with certain troweling techniques, color pigment additives, and polishing methods. The great thing about concrete is that the raw material is cheap, plentiful, easy to recycle and easy to harvest without hurting the environment, and it can be shaped into almost any shape, the way wet clay can be sculpted. That means that you can make a mold of most any size or shape and then create your tub in the mold, with wet concrete that hardens quickly and then can be polished so that your tub will resemble one made of marble or polished granite. 

Another interesting idea for a bath tub is to find an old claw foot tub, and some of them are seven feet long, so you can actually put fixtures on both ends and share the tub with a friend. These are collectors items and are pricey, however. When you are looking at clawfoot tubs, which are called that because the tub sits up on little feet like other types of furniture (because in the hold days the tub was portable, because there was no indoor plumbing, so the tub would be filled from buckets by hand), look out for rust. The enemy of any good steel tub is rust, and this will show up around the opening were the faucets go. If it has been hidden by paint, you may be able to find evidence by looking for surfaces that are bumpy or wavy, where under the paint rust is formed. 

If you are putting in a tub, especially one of heavy concrete, you must first check to make sure that the floor of your bathroom can handle supporting the wieght of your new bath tub.  Other than that, the choices are limited only by your space, imagination, and budget.