You might think that choosing a tub was easy.  Not so I say.

Early last year we went to a local pluming supply, sat in some tubs, and chose one based mostly on look.  You might remember this picture.

Fast forward 9 months and we started looking over the spend with a microscope, it was easy to settle on the cost of the tub, at $4,500, as something to look into.  We thought that was an outrageous amount to spend on a tub.  (Turns out, it really isn’t that ridiculous to spend that much on a master tub for a house like ours, but we were still determined to find one for cheaper.)

So we started looking into tubs that might work and were cheaper.  We were a little hemmed in by the fact that our tub is centered on the window in our master bath, and to one side is our shower.  To keep it centered, we can only go so big.

We spent a few months looking at this and that and it was pretty easy to dismiss any particular model as too short, not deep enough, etc.  But we really needed to order a tub, so what to do?

First, we measured the area to determine the maximum size tub we could handle:  70 inches long, 34 inches wide, and 24 inches tall.

Next, I looked around for the best place to find free-standing tubs, that also had all of the relevant specifications.  It turns out that Wayfair.com was very helpful.  For one, they have a very exhaustive list of free standing tubs (about 2,000 total) of which about 350 are between 69 and 73 inches long (the closest length category they had).

Second, they list quite a few relevant specs in the search results.

Turns out, that one in the center, soaking depth, is one of the most important ones.  You seek my wife and I are both over 6 feet tall, and, to really enjoy a tub, we want to be able to submerge most of our bodies under water.  A soaking depth around 12 inches just isn’t that great an experience.  We need at least 15 inches of soaking depth, and preferably more.

Going through the list of 350 tubs, I found about 50 that seemed reasonable at first look.  Wayfair is also great because, for almost every tub, they link directly to the spec sheet.

Here is the spec sheet for the tub we chose:

In addition to soaking depth, there were two other dimensions we were concerned about.  The first was the angle of the back on either side.  When we went back to the tub we had originally chosen, and laid in it again, it felt very uncomfortable.  The back sites at a 9 degrees down from straight up.

The second dimension is the length of the floor inside the tub.  This is for the most part what drives how high your knees go when you lay down in a tub.  From sitting in 20 or more tubs in showrooms, we felt that 55 inches was quite dreamy, 50 inches was acceptable, and 45 inches was uncomfortable.  This tub has a 50 inch bottom, right in the middle,which works.

To determine the angle of the back, I pulled the drawings into a CAD program and dropped an angle jig I created on top, like this:

That allowed me to approximate the angle of the back.  In this case, it is about 25 degrees down from vertical.  The angle is a trick thing because, if it is too shallow, it isn’t comfortable, but if it is too steep, you give up quite a bit of the length on the bottom, making the tub uncomfortably short.  It turns out that in this particular case, 25 degrees seems like a happy medium given our overall length constraints.

I whittled the list of 50 down to 10 or so that generally met our specifications, then, reviewing them with my wife, we were able to chose the above tub as the best one, both aesthetically and functionally.

But, we really wanted to sit in it before we committed to it.  The company that makes the tub is in Chino Hills, CA, about 150 miles from us, but isn’t open to the public.  However, they were able to put us in touch with a vendor that sells online, but also has a small showroom in Los Angeles.  They were able to transfer a tub from their warehouse to their small showroom, and it turned out to work perfectly to swing by one our way back from a weekend trip to Big Bear.

We, of course, had try it out with the entire family.

The tub was delivered today.

We need to move the tub drain to fit the new tub as the tile guys are getting close to setting the floor tile, and the tub goes on top of the floor tile.  Now that we have the tub, we can do that.