When most people move into a new apartment, they have a mixture of excitement and exhaustion, but looking into my new bathroom I only felt disgust. After a month of searching for the perfect house in a new city (New York City to be exact), I settled on a cozy rental in Brooklyn, with my landlord’s promise of a clean apartment from top to bottom. After carrying the furniture and all the boxes up the seemingly endless stairs, my first instinct was to wash up in the shower.

So you can imagine my surprise starring a bathtub that looked dirty, with water stains and mold covering the bottom. The pale blue tub glazing had worn through the tub’s surface, revealing a strange mix of gray patches of what I assumed was grout. Even the drain and plug had begun to rust, although they could be replaced more easily. Against my own judgment, I took a shower that night, only to feel less clean than before I walked in.

Although the owner had promised to restore the tub to work when I signed the lease, the crew still had to replace the old tub. The next day I called them to have the bath replaced again, but now it was a problem; They could re-varnish our bathroom surfaces, but we couldn’t use the bathroom for another 48 hours!

Later that day, the crew arrived and took over the entire bathroom, spending the rest of the afternoon cleaning and spraying polish over the tub. All surfaces needed to be taped together or else the glazing would ruin the rest of our bathroom. I could barely stay inside my apartment with all the noxious fumes, even with all the windows open. Two days later I stepped into the shower for the first time, more concerned with ruining the new finish of the tub than with enjoying the bath.

Recently, my friend told me about the same problems during his apartment search, so after learning about our ordeal he wanted to find a better solution. Rather than ask the landlord to re-varnish the bathtub, he sent them a link to acrylic bath surface repair, which can be tailored to any bathtub. Because this took less time to install, your landlord had no trouble replacing the old fixtures with a new acrylic bathroom liner.

Replacing the bathtub with an acrylic bathroom liner would have been a much more affordable option and a better investment in the apartment for the owner. Especially now that the bathtub surface is starting to wear down again, I would like to ask my landlord to simply replace the bathtub with an acrylic shower surface this time. It might be a lot easier for the next tenant to move in, and next time I’ll know a lot better what to ask for in my apartment search.