The bathtub is white!

One of the worse parts of the bathroom (after the half painted floors) was the baby blue bathtub. For some reason I never got a full picture of the tub in all it's baby blue wonder....but here is the best I have of a before, seen in the mirror:

The tub was the same color as the painted tiles surrounding the tub, except the paint was coming off in a few spots, showing the white underneath. 

We started the process using the Citristrip that we used for the floors.  That got us to this:

And then to this after a few more coats:

In other words, the Citristrip was just NOT working well enough.  So we decided to bust out the toxic heavy duty stripper.  That didn't get us much further.  Then we decided to use the paint stripping sander we had borrowed from my parents.  After a few hours (thanks Dad and Josh!) we finally got to this:

Imagine that...a WHITE bathtub! We are thinking we will have someone come in to refinish it since its not in the best condition, and also get some new tub hardware.  The next step is figuring out what to do with the blue tile surrounding it.  We want to figure out something that won't be a long and complicated project, but also won't break the bank...