How to Caulk the Exterior of a House

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Grady Johnson and I'm a professional painter. And today I represent ExpertVillage.com. Now we're going to talk a little bit about the caulking. Now, when you're caulking these exterior surfaces, you're going to want a little bigger hole than you had on the interior caulking because generally the cracks are going to be a little bit bigger and you want a little more caulking to work. Remember when you're caulking the stuff next to the stucco, that's going to be pretty rough. So be sure and use a light touch with your finger. Now the most, the main caulking you're probably going to have to do on most of the exterior work you do is up on the eaves and on the windows. These are the things that people leave. You won't find a lot of caulking you got to do on storm windows. Mostly you're going to find that on like these jalousy windows or like a sash window will have a lot of caulking. What you want to do is you want to look for these cracks like you see here. They're all up in here. Little cracks that you're going to want to hit with the caulking. We're going to have to go ahead and open up a new tube of caulking. So, I want to talk a little bit about that and about our caulking gun. Now caulking gun, you just want to be sure and have a good action on it. You see how it feeds in, this little plunger feeds the caulking into the tip. So, we're going to have to take this tip, cut it off at the tip and then we're going to poke it with this little poker here to make sure that that caulking comes through. So the first thing we're going to do is set out caulking gun out of the way. We're going to cut the tip of our tube. Now to do that, I keep a little pocket knife that I use for cutting stuff like this. I'm going to go ahead and cut that tip with this. It's a little bit sharper and it does the trick for me. So you just go ahead and cut that end. So, I like to keep the hole fairly, fairly small, but it is exterior so I want to have a little width to it. So go ahead and pop that off of there. That's way too small. So I'm going to come back a little farther and hit that again. Now see that's getting to where I want it. I'm going to even that out a little. That's nice. Do that again. All right. That's a really nice hole for that now. So what I'm going to do is put my knife away and go ahead and poke this with my poker. All Right. I poke that real quickly. Great. All right. Just pop that in there. All right. Now we're going to cinch that on up and then put that up in your corner and feed that across. Now, you can see here these little ridges that are on here, you don't want to leave that. It's important you want to wipe that out. So, stick your finger up there. Pull that on out so it's even. That way when that dries up, it's not going to leave a line and it's going to cover okay with paint. If you leave those little ridges in there it's going to get really ugly. And, be sure to bring out both sides all the way around. Get this side, too. You can spin your caulking tube a little bit to get your angle where you want it. All right, now that we have that in there we're going to wipe that out as well. Now, this is where you want to be careful on these rougher surfaces. If you get a little burr there, go slow. Don't try and go fast over these little burrs or you'll cut yourself. Now, these kind of line here, they are flat. You would normally spackle those. But when they're like this and they're more like a line, go ahead and throw a little caulk in there. Then, if it doesn't fill up all the way you can always hit it with spackling. The key to this is to keep a thinner line, not too thick and to be sure you really, really wipe that out good. Any holes that are left over, you can always fill with spackling. But since it is a straight line it works. The key is to keep, is to really wipe that out. You don't want to leave any ridges in there. All right. I think we've got this one pretty tight, so we're going to move on down. But to add, also we've got to get to these windows and door jambs. But this is how you do the exterior caulking."