How to Caulk the Cracks for Painting a Bathroom

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Grady Johnson and I'm a professional painter and today I represent expertvillage.com. Now, I want to talk a little bit about caulking in your bathroom when you're preparing to paint for oil paint. Now, caulking is essential to any painting, because that's what fills in all the cracks. Remember, when you're working with an acrylic latex caulk, it doesn't sand, so smooth out the lines all the way. Don't leave any ridges or burrs on there and you shouldn't ever have any problem. Now, whenever you're caulking, you want to have just a good, regular caulking gun. There are a lot of different types out there. Just be sure that the plunger does work, it has a cut-off button, and you have something to poke the diaphragm of the caulking tube with. The caulking tube is real simple. It just needs to be cut at an angle so that you can work with it. And then, don't cut the hole too bit or too little, that way it will get a nice flow. And then, you just poke the little diaphragm down there to allow the caulking to come through. And then, you take the caulking gun and then just pull the caulking out. My beads started. Run a little bead out there. Get that started, then I'm going to wipe that on out. Now, wipe that out. When I wipe it out, I want to be sure to get any of these little ridges off of here and even that on out because caulking does not sand. It's going to dry hard just the way it's left. So you want to smooth everything on out. Now this looks like we need to bring it around a little bit here. See that's a little dirty. I'll just take my 5 in 1 and pop that in the corner to be sure that's nice and clean. That way I know that's going to stick to that. And you'll find that as you go along, little places you need to just touch up on a little bit from your prep work. Put a bead in there and then just jump in there and pull that on around. Now you see you got up on there, nothing to worry about. Just even that on out and wipe that out as well. And then I'm going to go ahead and run something along the edge here. Now you see I'm getting everything that I can reach from this position because right now I'm seated. If I can sit down or get a comfortable spot, I'm going to use that. That's the kind of painter I am and I recommend you do the same. The day is long. Don't make it any harder than it has to be. I'm going to go ahead and hit this line and bring that up just as far as I can reach it. And once you have your caulking bead on there, just run that out with your finger. A lot of this is just looking, if you see that you've closed it up, then great. If it's too much caulking, you'll have a bunch of roll-over ridges that you'll have to wipe out. If it's not enough caulking, you'll see little black spots in your line which shows that there are holes there. You need just to add a little more caulking. Well, I still have a lot of caulking to go. I even got to do the insides of these cabinets. But these are a few of the tips you want to keep in mind whenever you're doing the caulking for your bathroom, when you're getting ready to paint it in oil paint."