It’s week 2 of DIY July and I definitely thought I’d have more DIY projects to share with you by now. Unfortunately, I’ve mostly been painting and that’s simply not a very interesting blog post. I’m really surprised by how long it has taken me to paint this house. Years ago I painted the entire house in three weeknights. Now I’m painting one room at a time all because of my damn back. Painting the walls goes really fast, but I can only paint one wall of baseboard at a time before my back goes out. Getting old is a bitch! Luckily I’ve figured out the only thing that helps when my back is tight: my recumbent elliptical. So I work until my back hurts, then I jump on the elliptical for an hour. And then I’m tired, but at least my back doesn’t hurt!
I finally got SOMETHING done that wasn’t painting so we can move on to today’s blog post: recaulk your kitchen in your pajamas! Okay, you don’t have to be in your pajamas. Search engine optimization rewards you for having the right length title, so I threw in the pajama bit because I did this at the end of a long day and I was of course in my pajamas. Because I’m pretty much always in my pajamas when I’m at home. Y’all have seen the inside of my closet. Well, I have almost as many pairs of pajamas as I have cardigans. Almost.
Okay, so on to the caulking in my kitchen. The problem I had was that I had cracked grout between my subway tile backsplash and my countertops.
Grout just really doesn’t have the give that you need here, so instead of regrouting this particular spot, I decided to caulk.
Materials
- A chisel
- A hammer
- Caulk (I use the squeeze-tube kind whenever I can because I find caulk guns to be poorly fit to my tiny hands)
The first step here is to remove the cracked grout. This is where the hammer and chisel come in. If you were removing old caulk, you’d just need a knife to cut out the old caulk.
Now, you’re just going to squeeze your caulk into the cavity. Don’t worry about making this pretty because you’re going to fix it in a minute.
See how it’s all lumpy and wrong-looking? That’s okay! Now you’re going to do something so ridiculous that you’ll think “hey, this can’t possibly be part of this project:” you need to dip your finger in water. Okay, weird part over. Now, just run your wet finger over the caulk, smoothing it out.
And that’s it! You just let it set up and tomorrow your kitchen will look beautiful. Unless your kitchen is simply hideous. Recaulking isn’t going to work miracles, Sharon!
Man alive, I hope someone named Sharon reads this someday. And briefly thinks “how did she know my name?”
