Caulking the Molding for Base & Shoe Molding Installation

Video Transcript

" So now that we’ve got all our pieces on, all nailed and tight, the next step is to fill the nail holes and caulk the cracks wherever they may be. So this is just a standard caulking gun, very easy to use, standard caulking interior white is obviously the color that you want. It has measurements; you won't be able to see this on camera but it has little measurements right here on the very, very tip and it shows you where to cut it. Now these caulking guns have a thing where you can slide end right in here and click it like that and cut it before you put it in here but they don’t give you a very good cut. So I recommend just taking a razor knife and cutting it yourself. You find one of these little marks there. This one, there is an 8th inch and that is the one you want and you give yourself a little bit of an angle and just pull through it just like that and cut it just like that. So you should have a nice angled cut on there that way. When you are doing the actual caulking it sits well right on that, you can put the angle of the cut you just made right on top of the shoe molding, giving you a nice straight line. So you’re going to pull the handle a couple of times to get the caulking to the tip and once at the tip you can take a little bit off with your finger and just press it right into the nail hole just like that and then clear off the excess and your nail hole is filled and just repeat that every time you got to nail. The purpose of this is so it does not look like your shoe molding has a bunch of holes in it when you paint it. So just squeeze out a little bit more anytime you need to when filling your hole in and then when you are doing the top crack, you just try to match this angle here with how you are holding the caulking gun. So once it is on there you just pull, you keep steady pressure on the handle and keep the gun at a steady speed. Give yourself a pretty nice bead of caulking right there and then just take your finger and just wipe it, just like this, flatten it out and you can tell the difference right here with what I have flattened with my finger and what has not been flattened. So if you don’t flatten it, it is not going to look right and the trick to doing that is to use as little caulking as possible so you do not have a lot left over; you end up with a big mess. So just repeat how many times you need to flattening out the caulking with your finger, until you’re happy with it and that is it, caulking."