78 cm Doesn’t Fit Into 70. So Why Did I Order It Anyway?

My son had outgrown his bathtub.

Well, technically, he still fit in it. But at 11.5 months and almost 12 kg, simply fitting wasn’t really enough anymore.

Bath time is now serious business.

He wants to sit, turn around, splash, play and preferably bring half of his toys into the bath with him.

There just wasn’t enough space anymore.

So I needed a bigger one.

Sounds easy enough.

It wasn’t.

The problem: my shower is tiny

I don’t have a regular bathtub. I have a shower tray with roughly 70 × 58 cm of usable flat space.

And of course, it isn’t a perfect rectangle. The corners are rounded.

That immediately ruled out a lot of options.

Some of the larger foldable tubs I found were almost a metre long. Others were basically the same small baby tubs I was trying to replace.

And some were only suitable up to 15 kg.

My son is already almost 12 kg.

I really didn’t want to buy another bathtub just to repeat the whole search again in a few months.

I needed something that was big enough for him to actually play in, small enough for my shower, foldable because we don’t have much space, and ideally useful for years rather than months.

I asked ChatGPT to find one

And this is where things got a little funny.

I explained what I needed.

Then I explained it again.

And again.

ChatGPT kept suggesting basically the same type of foldable baby bathtub I was trying to replace.

Small. Foldable. For a baby.

No.

Then we moved on to options that made more sense but cost a ridiculous amount of money.

Meanwhile, I searched BabyOne, Smyths, Temu, Joybuy and Amazon myself.

At Smyths, I found the Ingenuity Tuckaway. At least it was finally closer to what I had in mind.

But I still couldn’t find something I was happy with for the next few years.

Then I found a Lafisun foldable bathtub on Amazon.

I found it. Not ChatGPT.

That part matters.

And this is where ChatGPT finally became useful

The Lafisun looked almost perfect.

Large, deep, foldable and with plenty of room inside. The listing said it could be used for children from 0 to 8 years.

Price: €27.89.

There was just one small problem.

Its dimensions were:

78 × 45 × 30 cm.

The usable length of my shower tray:

70 cm.

78 cm does not fit into 70 cm.

At least according to basic mathematics.

Normally, I would have stopped there.

78 > 70. Next bathtub.

But instead, I sent photos of my shower to ChatGPT and asked whether there was any chance it could still fit.

And this is where AI was actually useful.

78 cm wasn’t necessarily the number that mattered

The listing showed the overall dimensions of the bathtub.

What I couldn’t find anywhere was the measurement I actually needed: the length of the base that would physically sit on the shower tray.

The bathtub wasn’t a rigid rectangular box measuring 78 cm from top to bottom.

From the photos, you could see that the sides and supports were angled and that the tub became wider towards the top.

ChatGPT pointed out something pretty logical:

the bathtub could be 78 cm long at the top while its footprint was noticeably shorter.

Which meant it might fit.

There was still no guarantee. We didn’t have the exact base dimensions.

It was an educated guess based on the shape of the bathtub and the shape of my shower tray.

We compared everything again.

Shower tray:

70 × 58 cm

Bathtub:

78 × 45 × 30 cm

The width was fine. There was about 13 cm to spare.

Length was the problem.

And the rounded corners of the shower tray made it even harder to judge from numbers alone.

I decided to risk €27.89.

And... it fit

Not loosely.

Not in a “well, technically we managed to squeeze it in” kind of way.

It fit almost perfectly.

The tub sits firmly inside the shower tray, doesn’t wobble and feels completely stable.

The reasoning worked. The dimensions listed on the product page simply didn’t tell the whole story about how much floor space the bathtub actually needed.

And my son now has much more room.

He can sit, turn around, play with his toys and create exactly the level of chaos he considers necessary for a proper bath.

Problem solved.

So, did ChatGPT help?

Yes.

Just not in the way I expected.

As a product search assistant, it wasn’t particularly good this time.

No matter how I explained what I needed, it kept suggesting products that didn’t really solve the problem. Then it moved on to options that were much more expensive than I wanted.

I found the bathtub myself.

But finding a product and feeling confident enough to order it are two completely different things.

I had measurements, photos, a shower tray with annoyingly rounded corners and a product that, according to the numbers on the page, shouldn’t have fit at all.

Trying to judge all of that myself wasn’t easy.

And this is where AI actually helped.

Not as a search engine.

Not as something that magically knew the right answer.

More like another pair of eyes that helped me look at the construction, compare it with the actual space I had and decide whether taking the risk made sense.

And that’s probably my biggest takeaway from this little experiment:

AI might not always find the best product, no matter how carefully you explain your bathroom, apartment or shoe size.

But sometimes, when it comes to making the actual decision, it deserves a lot of credit.

Without ChatGPT, I wouldn’t have ordered this bathtub.

And who knows how many more hours I would have spent looking.