caulking

We’ve been keeping up quite the pace with the home projects recently. 

After beginning our basement organization on Monday, we decided to tackle recaulking our tub on Friday.  We figured that since we were going tubing and camping for the weekend, (a) we weren’t getting up and taking showers and (b) there would be plenty of time for the caulk to set up before we got home on Sunday and needed showers.

I’m mean and gave Will the hard job of removing all the old layers of caulk.

Here he is working on the particularly stubborn upright edges of the tub:

The long side of the tub came up a bit better but was the gross portion of the project:

He fought with all that old gross caulk for about an hour and half before it was all done.  I then took over to clean the edges and apply the new caulk. 

Well, Will doesn’t seem to enjoy taking pictures of me doing work as much as I do him so I don’t have any pictures of the grossness that was under the old caulk.  I doused it in bleach and scrubbed with a toothbrush that we have set aside for such projects.  Then, following the directions I got from Bob Villa’s website, I taped off the tub portions that needed caulk.

Then it was time to apply the caulk.  We’d gotten clear silicone caulk that was supposed to set up in 4 hours.  I had a bit of a problem getting the caulk to start flowing.  That’s when Will stepped in and kindly read the directions (I’m an engineer; I can just skim directions) and discovered that you have to puncture the seal before the caulk will flow.  Oops.

It went really well after that.  It’s actually super easy – you just squeeze the bead of caulk out into the crevice, smooth with a damp paper towel, remove the tape and smooth again.

The only problem – clear caulk doesn’t conceal the space between the top edge of the tub and the bottom (uneven, of course) edge of the tile. 

So we have to do it all again in the near future with white caulk.  yay.

We also discovered definitively that the tub has been resurfaced at some point in the past.  We kind of thought so given the condition of the floor of the tub but the fact that we’ve found the chipped edges, seals it.  Just something else to cover up with the white caulk.