Caulkerspaniel

Ok, now that we've all laughed for five minutes about that amazing post title, wow I really out did myself with that one. I have one hour to write this post and keep up the 5-days-a-week streak, so I'm going to keep this short and sweet.

Last time we talked about our bedroom we had painted and installed trim, with tasks left like patching nail holes, priming, painting, and caulking. My parents helped us out with the trim as they had done their own last year, except they still haven't caulked theirs because they are scared of it.

At first I thought this fear was crazy, how hard can it be? One day while Philip was off at work I decided to give it a whirl. Got my little bowl of water, cut off the tip of the caulk, put it into the caulk gun (coolest non-deadly weapon ever), and I was ready to go. Lined it all up, started to pull the trigger...There was way more excess than expected. As I wiped it with a wet finger I was very quickly realizing the catastrophe occurring. I ran to get a wet rag, and with that, learned the trick to caulking successfully. Make a huge mess, then clean it up with a wet rag before it dries. Secrets to success people.

My first section of caulk, the rest looks a lot better...
but this gives you an idea.

I stopped when I got to the dark walls, fearing that I might mess it up big time and it'd be a lot less blended in. Philip finished it up on the weekend as he has a much steadier hand. However, we did encounter another obstacle. We were noticing that the paint was peeling off a lot when we wiped away the caulk, so we went back to Rona and bought some latex painters caulk instead of what we had been using previously. It worked a bit better, there was still some paint loss, but my mom came back and worked her cutting in magic and it was all better.

We got through it although some profanities were surely tossed around, and it wasn't altogether smooth, but we got it done.

Has anyone else caulked anything recently? Is it easier than I think?

Least favourite things about caulking:

• It's sticky and weird when you get it on your hands
• So messy - this kind of goes with the first one
• I hate how it keeps coming out of the tube even when you're not pulling the trigger so it's just constantly coming out and you have to put it on something when you need to put it down to smooth

Caulk stream going strong even when I'm not using it. 

It does make the job look a lot more finished, and I'm glad we did it even though it might have been one of my least favourite tasks so far. One thing I've been learning through this whole thing is that we get hung up on one task, hate it, notice every flaw, then move on to the next and completely forget about it and we don't even notice the work we did on it anymore. It's like a woman in labour, forgetting that horrible pain and having 3 more children.