Once More into the Breach, Dear Friends, Once More!

Is there a such thing as a serial caulker?

I started this process with a couple of baseboards last Thursday.  Then late Monday afternoon I noticed how awful the gap looked between the surface-mounted conduit and the wall surface at the north end of the room.  And the rest of the baseboard under it.

And what about the yawning chasms between the painted door trim at the bottom of the stairs and the yellow walls perpendicular to them?

Yikes, nasty.

And there I was with a partly-used tube of white painter's caulk, and everyone knows what happens to that if you just stick it on the shelf of your workshop and forget about it.  So really quickly, just before time to change for choir practice, I ran beads of caulk along all the offended gaps and smoothed them down.

The next day, yesterday, after I'd touched up the dark yellow paint, I got a good look at it without the bright work light on.  Of course then I saw the ridges of caulk I sloppily left lying on the trim.  There was a particularly rough place next to the jamb of the doorway at the bottom of the stairs.  I endeavored to use my thumbnail to scrape it off.  I miscalculated the force needed and ran my thumb into the space between the trim and the wall.  Now I had a big hole in the caulk there, and I was all out.

Well, I needed to run up to the stores near the Lowe's this morning, anyway . . .

In progress

But who's going to open a new tube of caulk just for an inch and a quarter hole?  Not I.  Besides, there were several other areas that really did need filling.  Like the gaps along the sides, top, and bottom of the woodwork cover to the vent stack.  Actually, I'd bought the first tube of caulk to take care of that.  I'd been thinking I should get the new boot on the stack and let the plaster and so on dry out, but here I was with a tube in my gun, and hey, it'll dry out through the wood and the plaster, right?  Won't it?

So this evening that got caulked.  As did the crack between the window trim and the wall on the north end.  And the open ends of the tongue-and-grove flooring that shows above the head of the stairway door.  Et cetera, et cetera.

All this caulking has necessarily been followed with touch-ups in three colors (if you count white as a color).  And scraping caulk off of where it doesn't belong.  Tomorrow I still have to do the touch-ups from what I caulked tonight.  I think I'm going to keep finding gaps and cracks in this room that need to be filled till the end of time.  It will never, ever end.