BELMONT – “Did you see the Irish tub?”

Bill Coughlin, looking disheveled but momentarily energized by his own question, sat on the closed lid of a toilet in the bathroom of a home overlooking Belfast Bay. In front of him was a gleaming white cast iron tub he had just finished reglazing. The rest of the room, too, sparkled as though all of its dirt had been relocated to the man now looking over the tops of his glasses, waiting for an answer.

A half hour earlier, I'd called him from his workshop on Route 131 in Belmont where he restores any tub he can resonably extract from its house. He also keeps a yard full of old cast iron tubs that he offers for sale, fully restored. The Irish tub was in there somewhere, but not being an expert on tubs, I told him I didn't think I'd seen it.

He promised to show me later, and left for the moment to my own devices, I imagined something austere but soulful like the Irish themselves. Actually I imagined a pot of gold, which turned out to be partly right.  

Coughlin, who does business as "Mr. Tubs," specializes in reglazing cast iron bathtubs and the occasional sink, but he also repairs fiberglass tubs — the Belfast home had one of each. In 2004, he started dabbling in the trade, working with his son-in-law in Rhode Island. At the time, he had no aspirations of becoming Mr. Tubs, but after acquiring enough knowledge to get himself properly in trouble, he knew he either had to step up or get out of the business.

"There's so many ways to screw up a tub and you don't know how to fix it," he said. "....So I went to school."

School meant a succession of certifications and weeklong apprenticeships with masters who charged Coughlin as much as $1,000 a day for tips on the finer points of the craft. He learned about fiberglass tubs in Elizabethtown, Penn., acrylics in South Boston, Va., spent a week in Chicago, another in Wilmington, Delaware.

In Lubbock, Tx., he worked with a "real master" on "little weird stuff." In Sacramento, Ca., he worked with a reknowned antique plumber. No two people did it the same way.

"I hit on everybody for bits and pieces, but the formula I use, nobody uses."

On a very basic level, Coughlin's technique involves etching the inner porcelain surface of the tub with acid, applying a special paint and a urethane sealant with varying degrees of sanding along the way. When he's done the tubs could almost pass for new. The process also abates lead that can leach from worn porcelain glazes into bathwater. This health concern was illuminated on Good Morning America in 1995, when some newly-manufactured tubs still posed a risk. Newer porcelain tubs aren't likely to have the problem, but how many porcelain tubs are less than 15 years old? If anything, this is the main reason Coughlin says to have a tub reglazed.

Coughlin made his first job for himself at age 17 cleaning bars in his hometown of Warwick, RI, later expanding the endeavor into a full-blown custodial business that serviced several several shopping malls in the New York metropolitan area. It was a successful run, but he ultimately burned out on the urban rat race and moved to Maine in 1989.

He and his wife opened a motel in Aroostook County and ran it long enough to become disenchanted with The County's treatment of outsiders. When she became ill with cancer, they moved to Belmont to be closer to medical care. She died in 1996.

A self described "hustler," Coughlin exhausted one business idea after another. He opened a bar called "Mugs Away" on Route 1 in Belfast and later made a business of selling sandwiches to gas station convenience stores around the state before sandwiches at gas stations were the norm. He had a staff of four and two drivers working out of a Route 3 building in Belmont, a stone's throw from his current location. When the competition caught up with him, Coughlin moved on.

"When people see you do something good, they always mimick it. That's why this is good," he said, referring to his reglazing business. "You can't mimick this."

Having a tub refinished by Coughlin runs around $400. Buying one of the tubs he keeps at his shop, fully refinished, costs $700.

Aside from a Facebook page set up by his daughter, he doesn’t advertise and says most of his business comes either as drop -ns, or the kind of real life referrals (one of his customers reported being told at a local hardware store, “You’ve got to call Mr. Tubs!”) that advertisements can only imitate. Asked about his competition, Coughlin ran through a list of inferior options, everything from spray on coatings available at hardware stores to moonlighters and professional services, dismissing them all.

"I'm the only one around," he said.

Later at his shop, Coughlin showed me the Irish tub. It was a regular clawfoot painted in vibrant green and gold and ornamented with Irish, or maybe Irish-American, motifs: shamrocks, clinking beer mugs, a pot of gold on the bottom, and the crowning touch: a devilish leprechaun showing his bare bottom and inviting the viewer, in Gaelic, to kiss it.

For a man who makes his living whitewashing other people's stains and poisons, the Irish tub seemed the perfect metaphorical basin for years of displaced smut, and fitting of Coughlin's wry sense of humor.

"I had it in my head for a bunch of years," he said.

He has other ideas for custom painted tubs, too, including one he would decorate with the characters from Spongebob Squarepants and another that would pay homage to the fishermen of Gloucester, Mass., where he lived for a time.

The Irish tub, however, he plans to keep for himself.