The Claw

Surprisingly enough, I'm not referring to this claw.

Or even these.

No, this is the story of another kind of claw. A much more attractive-looking one, I might add!

Almost immediately after we got out claw-foot bathtub secondhand along with our kitchen cabinets, one of its claws broke off, leaving the poor bath a little unstable. And of course, it was the most conspicuous claw, the one nearest to the bathroom doorway.

Our temporary fix-it solution was to wrap a brick in an old towel and jam it under there to support that corner of the bath. And then we proceeded to shower in the bath for more than two years, living with the fact that when you placed your feet in certain spots, the tub would rock a little bit.

Well enough is enough!

Since there was no repairing the actual plate bit on the bottom of the tub that is supposed to grab onto the top of the claw, we had to come up with another solution.

And that solution is  to add a fifth leg! We found this adjustable rubber support thing at Bunnings, and mucked around a bit with positioning it so that the bath would no longer rock.

 

And as you can see, we could then just slot the fourth bath claw back into position, and like magic, our bath had four claws again!

You can hardly see our fifth leg in the shadows under the tub, and it's completely obscured from view from the doorway by the claw itself!

I think this is yet another job that deserves a place on the "I can't believe it took me two years to get that done!" list!