From £285 + VAT · 1-year guarantee
Your bath is stripped, primed and sprayed with three to four coats of enamel — in your bathroom, in a day, with no plumbing disconnected and nothing removed. Richard has been doing this for 38 years.
The work itself
Re-enamelling is not painting. The existing surface is chemically stripped and mechanically abraded back to a sound, keyed substrate. Old silicone comes off. Chips and rust pits are filled and levelled. A bonding primer goes on, then three to four coats of enamel, sprayed rather than brushed, and cured.
The whole job takes four to eight hours depending on the bath. The surface needs twenty-four hours before it gets wet. Start in the morning, use the bath the following morning.
The step people skip is the preparation. A surface sprayed over old silicone residue, or over enamel that hasn't been properly keyed, will lift at the waterline inside a year. That is what has usually happened when someone calls us to fix a previous refinishing job.
Edinburgh's baths
Edinburgh's Georgian and Victorian housing contains a remarkable concentration of original cast iron baths — New Town townhouses, Marchmont and Bruntsfield tenements, Old Town closes. Many have been in continuous use for over a century.
A cast iron bath is a better object than anything you can buy to replace it. The metal is thick, it holds heat, it doesn't flex, and the enamel is fused to it at high temperature rather than moulded. When the surface has worn thin at the waterline and around the taps, the bath itself is fine. Only the surface has failed.
There is also the practical problem. Getting a cast iron bath down a New Town stair, or out of a fourth-floor tenement flat through a close, is a serious operation. Two or three people, a stair crawler, and a real prospect of damaging the stairwell on the way. We resurface it where it stands.
Cost
From £285 + VAT
Acrylic or steel, sound condition, straightforward access.
£350–£450 + VAT
Heavier preparation, rust pitting, colour matched to original.
£450–£550 + VAT
Full external finish as well as the interior.
All with a one-year guarantee. No call-out charge anywhere in Edinburgh or the Lothians.
And when we say don't. If a steel bath has a torn or gouged surface, or the substrate itself has failed, resurfacing it is throwing money away. We will tell you. It costs us a job and it's the reason people call us back.
Where we work
Common questions
How long does bath re-enamelling take?
Four to eight hours on site. The surface needs twenty-four hours to cure before use. If we start at nine, you can use the bath the next morning. No plumbing is disconnected and nothing is removed from the room.
How long does it last?
Properly prepared, a decade or more. Badly prepared, under a year. The difference is entirely in the stripping and keying, which is the part that takes the time and cannot be rushed. We guarantee our work for a year, and in 38 years the callbacks have been rare.
Can you match the colour of my other sanitaryware?
Yes. There is no standard white — a 1930s bath, a 1970s avocado suite and a 2020 acrylic tub are all different. Colour is mixed on site against your existing basin and WC.
Will the smell be a problem?
There is an odour during application and for a few hours afterwards. We ventilate the room and mask the rest of the flat. In a tenement it clears within the day.
Do you re-enamel in listed buildings?
Yes, and it is a large part of our work. Resurfacing is non-structural and changes no building fabric, so it does not raise listed building consent questions the way removing and replacing an original bath does. More on listed building work.
No call-out charge anywhere in Edinburgh or the Lothians. Send a photo of the damage and we'll price it honestly.