Ironically, your happenstance with the vinegar is one of your best bets. Try heating it up and it should remove it faster. It is often used to clean paint brushes after paint has dried onto them. I'd personally bring the vinegar to HOT in a tea kettle or the like, lay down a bunch of old towels in the bathtub and then soak the towels with the hot vinegar. Let it sit for a while, remove the rags and then use a scouring pad. No clue how much of the paint it will remove, but if just scrubbing with a rag was getting paint off, I'd think this would get most all of it off.

We have an acrylic tub surround (tub + 3 sides all one unit) in olive (the 'new' avocado) and I want it gone! As this is a guest bathroom downstairs used infrequently I need a budget solution. The tub gets the most use in the winter when we fill it with water in anticipation of a snow storm! Since we remodeled our master bath all our friends and even the grand kids prefer it for their showers. Still, I think it's good to have one tub in the house. I have no idea when this olive tub was installed (pre 80's?) and, although it is in great condition...it is olive, as are the toilet and sink. The only way to convince DH to go ahead with the remodel is to seek out budget friendly options. The only things I am keeping are the vanity base which will be stripped and stained dark and the mirror which will be sealed and framed. I hope to replace the vanity top with a one-piece sink/counter. I will get a low-flow toilet, possibly linoleum tiles for the floor, new paint, new vanity light, new plumbing fixtures and....a new tub. I gained so much helpful information from this forum during our master bath remodel and I am hoping you will again share your opinions. We have a 60" alcove-style tub with no real design ideas. What are my budget options keeping in mind the cost of removing the acrylic tub and prepping for a new one? I want a simple white tub and will use good fixtures to upgrade the whole aesthetic. I haven't decided whether to use glass doors or a shower curtain. Both have pro's and con's. Tub + tile walls is on my wish list. Thoughts are very much appreciated.

Sorry, I guess I should clarify. (This is why I linked the product page, because I knew I would not be able to explain this properly.) The oval tub has a "preexisting" sort-of-deck with a flange on three sides, otherwise I would not be so daft as to try to put a shower over it. I like my kitchen ceiling where it is! Here, this is what it looks like: However, and this is what I was asking about with the deck question, from the instructions it appears that there must be some kind of deck on the fourth side which does not have a tile flange if one does not use the optional (icky) apron, but it does not say how wide this deck must be. We both would rather not have to clamber over a wide margin to get into the tub - DH has to use this for showering every day. I'm mostly a lay-backer, not a sit-upper - my shoulders and upper back get very very painful so I have to get them into the scalding water. Unfortunately there isn't enough room for the 5'5" tub that would let me keep both shoulders and knees underwater and actually cover up most of the protruding bits on the front, leaving pretty much just my head and hands (to hold my book, of course) out of the water. ;-) The room is only 60" wide - it was carved out of a bedroom - and even if we had budget to redo all the plumbing there isn't room to turn the tub round sideways. I dislike the look of "stuff" cluttering up tub corners so I'm considering a down-low niche for my shampoo/soap/etc. and a high-up one for DH's shower things, and there will pretty much never be any kind of decorative bits on the corners because they'd just get soaked with the shower spray anyway. Well, okay, maybe a rubber ducky. (But no flamingos!) :-) Those four were pretty much the only tubs I've found that fit the parameters of size/depth, cost (crucial!), and appearance. I'm a short-but-wide person and DH is medium-height(5'9")-and-wide and we both manage OK in a standard 60x32 oblong tub - 34" or 36" would be a nicer but pretty much all I could find in this price point were funky molded-up things that looked like they belonged on the space station. Yuck-O. The deepest of the four tubs is actually the oblong Bancroft at 15" water depth but I'm not thrilled with how it looks, the other three are 14" water depth. The oval looks like it would have less shoulder room but that's not the case? The one oval tub I've seen available for sitting in was just about big enough for a kindergartener to do laps in, so it's pretty useless for comparison!

Be careful if it's acrylic and not some kind of metal. Try a magnet if you don't know how to tell. Do not use magic eraser on acrylic or fiberglass. Or Comet/Ajax type cleaners. I would try a paste of water and baking soda first. It should work. If not, as Nancy says, Barkeepers Friend either liquid or powder should work safely, too.