Ow Gosh

Listening to past Holmes Inspection episodes while you work on your house can make the time go faster.  It also has a way of making you see urgent agenda items in areas you'd been perfectly happy to ignore.

Take the angle between the main block of my brick house and the brick front room, formerly the front porch.  Sometime in the house's history the two began to separate.  Some previous owner tried to rectify the problem by glopping the space full of concrete, and it's looked like hell since before I moved in.  But it's the way things were and I ignored it.  And the concrete patch has been spalling, and a wide-ish crack has been opening up between it and the brick of the house, also probably since before I moved in.  I've paid no attention to that, either.  Lately, I've noticed I can see daylight through that crack in the corner of my basement workshop, but neither has that hasn't gotten much reaction from me.

But here's Mike Holmes holding forth on the gospel of caulk and Keeping the Water Out, and bless me if I am unable merely to be a hearer of the word, I am goaded into being a doer of it as well.

But, oh, gosh! the path of virtue in not smooth, nor is it narrow.  Actually, it's wide and it's deep; it's thick and arduous and very, very tacky.

Which is to say that when I got outside this afternoon to do the job, I followed the directions on the Loctite concrete crack and masonry sealant and set to work cleaning all the loose material out of the crevice.  With that, the fun began.

Did I say "crevice"?  Crevasse, more like it.  Oh, gosh, once I got done rooting out the scree, I could have climbed down into my basement workshop without going around by the door and the stairs.  At worst the opening was about an inch wide and an infinity deep.  Good grief, what was I going to put in there to keep the caulk from falling in?  What if it got dark before I could thick of something?  What if it should rain tonight and flood my basement?  Ohno-ohno-ohno!

The little ½" backer rod I had on hand wasn't going to make it.  Hoping the clear weather held, I jumped in the car and ran up to Lowe's, where I bought 20' of 3/4" backer foam backer rod.  And a second tube of the masonry crack caulk just in case I ran out.

It took four layers of that 3/4" backer stuffed in that crack before I could even think to start the caulking.

"Start the caulking."  What a joke.  No matter how much I pushed, I couldn't get it to come out.  I asked my next door neighbor, and he told me I had to shove something long and skinny down the spout and puncture it.  Weird.  Haven't had to do that with any of the other caulk I've been using.  Never mind, I did it.  More heavy pushing, and the sealant eventually came.  Hellsbells, if it'd been me trying to birth a baby, I would've demanded a C-section.  Had I bought a bad tube of sealant?  Maybe, it's happened before.  Tried the other tube.  Same thing.

Called Lowe's.  Is this stuff supposed to be like this?  Guy in the paint department says that yeah, because it's for masonry and it's like mortar, it is thicker than regular caulk.  OK, but this thick?  He said if I couldn't get it to flow, to bring it back and they'd take a look at it.

Very nice, but it was after 5:00.  I had to get this crack filled before nightfall.  I kept pushing, pushing, pushing, and eventually the stuff came out.  But what an irregular mess!  And how frustratingly sticky!  Ohhh, gosh, was I glad I'd laid in a gallon of mineral spirits, because slopping that on my gloved fingers and using them to "tool" the joint was the only way I got it halfway smooth.  Sure didn't come out of the tube that way.

But at least it's done and the crevice is filled.  Can't see daylight on the inside any more.  And the sealant color is good, a nice grey-beige that kind of matches my brick.  And it smells like chocolate!  And though it looks like hell, it's definitely upper circle compared to what was there before.

I'd hoped to fill the much narrower and neater crack in the corresponding joint on the entry side of the house, but it got too dark.  Did fill a break in the stone step to the side door.  It glares, rather, since the sealant is so much lighter than the old stone, but it'll keep the water out and it'll dirty up eventually.

But if it doesn't firm up and it turns out that was a bad tube of sealant after all-- owwwwww gosh!!!

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.

Getting There: Caulk

While doing these various repair and painting tasks around my study the past few days, I've continued to listen to episodes of Holmes on Homes and Holmes Inspection on YouTube.  And it definitely gets into your head. 

So this afternoon when I'd peeled off the plastic dropcloth I'd taped to the baseboard to make it easier to prime the repair on the west wall, I seemed to notice for the first time in eight years the messy, gaping gap between the baseboard and the plaster.  And in my mind's ear sounded the voice of Mike Holmes saying, "It only would have taken them a minute to run a bead of caulk along that!  Messy, sloppy, shoddy!"

And here I'd bought a tube of caulk for this project, but had thought I could get away without using it.  Oh, all right. Yessir, yessir!

I proceeded to caulk that baseboard (what I could do without moving heavy furniture-- sorry).  I caulked along the top of the baseboard at the ledge by the attic hatch door.  And along the top of the base on the wall perpendicular to that.  I don't think I did a particularly artistic job of smoothing it.  And whether or no, I'm going to have to come back with the light yellow paint and touch it all up.

But I admit it looks better, and piddling as it is, it does count as progress.

"Caulk Is the Solution to All the World's Problems"

At least, that's what one of my architecture professors used to say.

But at the moment I'm wondering it it can cause more problems than it solves. In the short run, at least.

This noon, meaning Friday the 6th, the plumber sent by the home warranty company to unclog my bathroom sink asked if the drain assembly leaked. I told him I didn't think so.

But after he left and I was cleaning up, I noticed this ominous low place in the floor just behind the sink pedestal. And I noticed all the other gaps in the sealant between the ceramic tile wall and the sheet vinyl floor.

Yes, ever since my toilet overflowed the last day of 2007 I've had it on my To-Do list to renew the caulk in the upstairs bathroom. And today-- yesterday-- I finally got around to it.

In the afternoon, I started on the wall that the toilet and lav back up onto. Dug out the old sealant, made sure the floor and wall were nice and clean and dry, and activated the tube of tub and tile caulk bought for the purpose months ago, which was waiting in the basement just for this occasion.

This came out to be a pretty decent looking sealant joint, even if I did have to use three lengths of foam backer bead side by side in that low place. The other joint, the one on the wall next to the toilet, I don't like so much.

For more than one reason.

I didn't get started on it till after 10:00 PM. For one thing, I wanted to give the first joint time to dry a little before I pushed the storage unit up against it, and for another, I was actually, finally putting away Christmas decorations.

That joint was a real job to accomplish, and I was reminded why I'd been putting it off. The flooring there is curled up and in some places sits nearly 3/8" above the toe of the ceramic tile base. You can reach your fingers under the vinyl, there's that much of a gap.

But I washed it out with Simple Green on a sponge and removed as much of the old caulk as I could get at, then washed it out a little more. I dried it nicely and pushed in a long length of foam backer bead. Then I recut the tube tip so it was about the size of the Mississippi delta and ran a honking big bead of caulk all along that wall.

It looks awful. It covers the toe of the tile. It'll probably shrink and I'll have to go over it again in a day or two.

But it's done and the bathroom is clean and that should be the end of that.

Right?

Sorry, not exactly.

For after all this was completed, I went downstairs to take my dog out for his midnight constitutional. In the kitchen I heard something almost like a scratching sound-- was one of the cats on the counter getting into things?

I looked, and confound me if water wasn't dripping from my kitchen ceiling, in the same old places it always comes through when I have a leak from the upstairs bathroom!

I checked: Toilet wasn't overflowing. The bathroom sink nor the tub were running. Everything upstairs looked perfectly dry.

Oh, God, please let it be that I used too much water cleaning out that damned joint so I could caulk it! Pleeeeaaazzzzz don't let it be that the plumber's snake this afternoon hit a weak spot in the pipes and it took this long before it started letting water through! It only started a little while ago, and I've been using the sink to rinse out cleaning sponges all afternoon and evening! Pleeeeaazzzzz???

Nothing I could do about it tonight but lay a bathtowel on the kitchen floor and hope for the best. Oh yeah, and worry.

. . . It's after 2:00 AM by now and I just went down to the kitchen and checked. The dripping has stopped. So if it starts again, it has to be the bathroom lav drain pipe. I could even put food coloring in the washbasin and find out for sure. I mean, I'll have to repaint the kitchen ceiling anyway!

Well, plumbing repairs are covered by my home warranty, even should this not count as a followup call for the previous problem. The question is, does that cover replacing the drywall in my kitchen ceiling where they'll have to tear it out to do the plumbing repair? Or the bathroom tile if they have to go through the wall?

I guess I'll see. If I'm lucky the leak will only be an unintended consequence of a well-intended application of much-needed caulk.