Caulking is for the birds

I’ve typically enjoyed my time working on projects around our Marshfield home. I might have even talked about working on those projects in this very space before. I’ve worked on my basement floor and trim (twice due to flooding), installed new lighting in our basement and even installed a bidet in our bathroom (if you’d count that as a home improvement project). It works great by the way, thanks for asking.

But when I sat down in our bathroom to remove caulk that had broken up and caused our bathtub to not be so waterproof anymore, I had no idea I was subjecting myself to a whirlwind of a process.

I thought it’d be easy. I watched commercials for tools that scraped away caulk with no problem and a tool that could be used to evenly scrape away excess caulk to create a nice and even strip of caulk in the joint between the two surfaces.

I tell ya, they made it look easy but if someone was filming me attempt to remove and replace the caulk in our bathroom, it might’ve ended up in some sort of fail video. I counted three times I applied caulk and then didn’t like how it looked so I removed it and started again. I went through an alarming amount of caulk for the little area I was trying to finish. I also pulled a hamstring in the middle of it. Don’t ask how. I don’t even know how. One minute I was bending over to get a corner section of the tub and the next I was rolling around on the ground yelling to Kaitlyn to grab me a banana.

After about two hours of cutting, cleaning and applying caulk to the tub, I had completed it and I think it might just look worse than before. Kaitlyn said it looked OK but I’m pretty sure that’s just because she knew how much time and anguish went into the project.

I didn’t realize how messy the project would get. Granted, that’s probably partially due to my inexperience and three or four separate tries at the project but still, I had caulk everywhere. One of my favorite Milwaukee Bucks shirts entered the project as a solid green color with writing. It left the project as a spackled mess.

Although I view myself as somewhat of a handyman and a full believer in “I’ll figure it out before I actually learn how to do it,” I think next time, I’ll have to do some research on the internet to make my caulking attempt not so painstaking for everyone involved.

But that’s the beauty of homeownership and working with caulk in particular – you can always redo it one more time.

Speeding

Through

L

ife