How to Caulk Crown Moulding and Finish Trim Work

welcome back to the channel in this video I'm gonna be showing you the technique that you can use to efficiently [ __ ] crown molding in this example or any trim for that matter this technique will work on anything it's a real simple technique we're using DAP which a lot of people I know hates I do believe that they change their formula because I used to hate this DAP Alec's as well but we gave it another chance and we're very surprised by it so I think it's gotten better I know a lot of people dislike this but this is what we use and I'll show you it doesn't really matter what caulking you're using I'm just telling you what we use you can just take a little sliver off that and that's about I don't know a sixteenth or an eighth inch hole right there you don't want to have it too large it says an eighth right here on the tube and then a quarter and then those that say five sixteenths if you're cutting down there you've got a bigger problem so you want to keep it up here at the 16th or 1/8 inch hole you're cutting down there at that five sixteenths now just go ahead and take out what you put in and reinstall it and make it new because that's a huge gap you're trying to fill so don't cut the tube too low because you're just gonna use way too much caulking so we'll get right into this this particular scenario here where I'm gonna be talking this crown molding on a white ceiling the caulking is white we got white caulking it's pretty much all we use for all of our paint grade stuff the only thing you're gonna need for this is it caulking caulking tube and then we use a damp rag a lot of people use a sponge but we just use a damp rag it's nice and wet but not to the point where it's dripping water so just wet it completely submerge it or soak it in water and then wring it out to where it's not dripping that's perfect but you want to keep this rag wet because that's how you're going to keep your finger clean which is very important you don't want any caulking buildup on your finger I know they make tools and everything where you can wipe caulking but like they say there's a sucker born every minute just use your finger there's no reason to buy all these fancy caulking tools like so now that we have exactly what we need we have our wet rag our caulking tube cut to the proper diameter we can go ahead and get started on this now oh one other thing too I forgot you can cut this at an angle 45 degree angle a lot of people do that I just always cut it straight if you're gonna cut it straight you need to have it straight on the wall like this if you're gonna have it at a 45 you're gonna want to have it like this so you'll notice that the caulking will kind of fall off if you don't have it set up if you're not holding it so the way that you have it cut so if your hole if you cut it straight and hold it straight if you cut it at 45 hold it at 45 it's not that big of a deal and I can hold this at 45 and still get it pretty good for the most part just takes experience but with that tell you about the situation here we've got these walls we smooth out the walls this all the walls in this house were textured I smooth this one out and we still got to sand it so I'm not really worried about coming down too low with the caulking on here but I still want to keep it tight if this was a wall that was already painted we would take our blue masking tape and we use the blue stuff because it's very sensitive it's not doesn't have a lot of adhesion on the back of it but what we do if this was a finished room it was painted and I'll show you in another room that is finished and painted so you can see how clean the the line pulls we just take this and then we hold it about a sixteenth of an inch away from the molding and we just work it over so it's like a sixteenth of an inch away so it just looks like a nice cut in line so what I would do at this point is just press the trigger or pull the trigger squeeze the trigger whatever you want to call it and as I'm pulling that trigger I'll show you on this blue tape because you'll be able to see it the rate at which I pull the trigger is the rate at which I need to be pulling the gun moving the gun rather whether I'm pushing it or pulling it so as you pull this you want to move this at the same rate and you'll get a feel for that also that is based on how wide you cut this tip here because I'll show you right now this will show up on camera pretty good I'm thinking let me put another piece of tape so I can show you a few few ways to do it wrong as well so this should show up really good against that blue tape all right and before that dries this is a good point if you [ __ ] something you want to pretty much wipe it right away so you want to push that up in there and get it taken care of immediately because as soon as it comes out of the tube its oxidizing and that means it's drying and that means it's gonna build up and get chunky and get weird so you went ahead go ahead and only work a section that you can reach with your hands we would never walk into a room [ __ ] the whole room and then go back start you know wiping it off you only want to work which you can work with in less than a minute I would say so anyways let me talk about that rate of pull on the trigger and the rate of motion with the cocking gun so you'll be able to see this as I squeeze the trigger I want to move the cocking gun in the same way I'm squeezing the trigger the whole time slowly and moving the gun at the same rate it's a wavy line because I don't have a piece of trim to go up against usually you'll have a trim piece of trim to guide up against so you won't have a looks like a I just don't know what I'm doing here but it's just hard to keep it straight so let me show you what can happen if you don't move the gun as fast as you're pulling the trigger so it'd be like this it's just way too much talking and way too much I like of the gun being squeezed too hard so this is way wrong he would wipe that and you'd be it'd be wasting the cocking for one and you'd be having a lot of what we call snowplow is what I've known it as when I first was learning how to use a caulking gun and do this the guy told me you don't want snow plow which is when you a snow put one of snow truck drives through and it leaves like a line this is very exaggerated but it leaves like a big build up just imagine one of those snow pushing trucks driving through the road to clear the road on the sides of it and has big build ups of snow that the plow didn't get so in this case your finger represents the plow the caulking represents the snow you don't want any snow plow you want to be able to just push it in and wipe it like this there's no snow plow it's just smooth a smooth surface so that's what can happen or if you move the gun too fast you can have it like let's see that's not really a good example but I don't know you can have the line too thin where you're not really feeding the gap because you'll notice there's gaps up here you'll never get this perfect perfectly flush with the ceiling because of textured ceilings number one uneven joist number two other variables that come into play where you're gonna need to use some kind of caulking so with a white ceiling a white trim and a white caulking we typically never mask the ceiling the only times we really mask the ceiling is when we have a really drastic ceiling color change so if we had like let's say like a maroon ceiling or something just some someone had a different colored ceiling we would definitely match the ceiling and I'll tell you the ceiling is much harder well it takes a lot more time to masks in the wall because you got to get up under it you're gonna look at it get your 16th 16th reveal between the tape and the molding and then you gotta work it that way so that's a sixteenth of an inch away from the molding the whole way down it's not a difficult task it's just a time-consuming task so when we have a finished wall and a finished ceiling we have masking on both top and bottom of the B trim and that is for the purpose of caulking and painting we never spray our crowns or anything because there's just way too much masking work and a finished and furnished home it's just not gonna happen we brush all this stuff so not only does it help protect the caulking from going down on the wall whenever we come back and brush it we have guards now so when we pull when we're done we paint this thing we pull a tape we have nice clean paint lines which is why we recommend some kind of low adhesive tape like the blue tape or anything that's low adhesion that's gonna stick you have a clean like 2 2 week removal time don't use masking tape don't use just regular painters tape because we have notice that it pulls off paint and even some paint even some tapes will pull off texture so just keep that in mind you don't want to that is a nightmare let me tell you when it pulls off the paint it's not a big deal we go back and touch it up unless it's a faux finish wall then it's a nightmare if you know what a faux finish wall is you know why our wallpaper I've had paint I've had tape ripoff wallpaper textured wallpaper it was a nightmare but yeah with that that's what we would do we would just run this here as a guide and then we could paint and everything and when we pull the tape it would be good I'm not gonna [ __ ] this with tape on it or I guess I will have I have plenty of other areas I could cost without tape I'll go ahead and [ __ ] this with tape show you what that looks like and then I'll move somewhere else and [ __ ] without tape or let's just do this let me just rip off some of this so we can just do it from the same area alright so when you're talking with the tape you've got more of an advantage we don't have to be as clean with your gun your cocking gun work and your finger is what you can do you can get it in there use a nice smooth movement oh I know another thing to a lot of these caulking guns this one's pretty used so it doesn't do it as much anymore they claim they're dripless but when you let go of the trigger they still come out slowly so what you can do is just turn this thing and it releases the pressure because the gears here that pulls it when you squeeze it so if you pull it off that gear it'll turn it off now in a sense okay so we got this cocked right here this on this blue tape what we're gonna do and where you have a more of advantage with doing it with tape is you can kind of just be sloppy with it so you can I don't know just push it and I'm trying to be sloppy with it I don't know but you can you don't have to be as clean as you would if you were gonna do it on this raw ceiling with no tape but what you can do is you can push this in there and just pull it out I got a little bit of snowplow right there cuz I was trying to be sloppy with it but then you you want to push it into the gap and you want to still see the profile of this this molding here you've got the molding there you've got the ceiling this is kind of like a zoomed in point of view if you will you've got this molding coming into the ceiling like that it creates this 90 degree on this profile here you want to see that you don't want to see a circular like I'll show you here you don't want to just caulk this and just kind of lightly press it you see how thick that line is right there compared to this that is so thick and that is so thin the problem with that one of the problems with that is when you pull your tape all that's coming with it you're gonna be in big trouble if you're gonna use the masking method with the caulking you must you must push that caulking all the way in that gap clean it up to where you can see the edge of the tape still all this area right here that I've cocked already all this area right here I can see the full width of the tape it's not hidden like it is right here if you can't see the full width of the tape you're in trouble so you need to wipe that off so you can't see it this is what it needs to look like just push it in there filled in the gap if it's the tape is still visible and you should be good to go now I'm gonna pull these tapes now and you should be able to see a difference here and here so you can see that our gap is here and then our caulking line is here and it just looks nice and finished it looks like it belongs there that's exactly what we want there's some snowplow on that piece of tape and that is very little snowplow and that's completely fine because that's an advantage of using masking tape now if this represents the sealing in which case it does that would have been on the ceiling that would not be fine so I was being a little sloppy with that one just to prove the point but if you're gonna [ __ ] without the tape what you need to do is the same steady pull and this of the gun and and movement of the gun and what you want to do is not push so much don't be so firm with your cleaning technique when you're wiping the caulking so let me show you what I mean if I was this is a white ceiling white trim white caulking I don't need to mask the the ceiling so what we would do in a real-life situation we would just come around the ceiling pull like that nice bead there and then just gloss over it with the edge of your finger you still want to have that that 90 where the crown in the ceiling meet and I still have it because I'm using the edge of my finger and this is why it's so important to not cut that that caulking tip so thick because that's what you'll end up with you'll you'll you'll end up with a big mess up there you'll end up with a lot of snowplow on the ceiling and if you've ever seen that it's really noticeable so this looks all uniform now this looks all uniform and then I'll pull this I doubt this is going to show up on the camera but I'll pull this and you'll be able to see how nice and clean that comes out and that looks really good so that's kind of the overall basics of caulking the whole goal of it is to fill in a gap it's not to round out any profiles it's not to float anything out necessarily it's just we've got a small gap between the walls and the crown fill it in we got a small gap between the crown and the ceiling fill it in so I'll caulk one of these corners show you what that looks like and just kind of say anything in my mind that comes up as I do that as well one thing you'll notice too as you're going around a room like this your rag will start to get filled up with excess caulking you want to keep that clean because of less caulking you have on the rag that means a less caulking you're gonna have on your hands in the cleaner job you're gonna do with this silicone so clean that out just use a bucket if you're gonna do it in the sink pull that little thing on the sink up and dilute the caulking and turn it into basically water before you let it go down the drain because if you let big chunks of this caulking go down the drain you can imagine what would happen to the drain there so just be careful with that now we'll get started on this corner what I do is I just work like a two or three foot section at a time and I'll get the whole corner top bottom in corner but if you're just starting out maybe just do the top first in the corner and the bottom but the more seamless you can get a corner with top bottom and corner the better of a job it's gonna look it's better of a job you're gonna do it's gonna look better so when you're doing this you want to remember feather the edges out add a little air pocket right there on the tube so I'll fill that little piece in just a steady pull steady consistent pull and then you'll come down on the corner same thing on the corner steady consistent cool and you'll put down your bead of caulking as they call it now what comes out of the caulking tube it's called the bead but you never want to leave a bead on any kind of trim you always want to keep that profile nice and strong so the bead is what comes out of the tube you're gonna knock that bead down so I'll start here push it into that corner and just get that corner nice and tight and then I'm gonna pull away from the corner and then I'm gonna pull away from the corner if I need to go back and push this corner anymore it'll create ripples in the the caulking work and then I'll have to feather it out so you always want to feather out and make it look as seamless as possible now when you're coming down this corner a lot of people will wonder about this do I leave it thick or do I you know force it in there really you want to force it in there you want to force it in to fill in any tiny gap and don't leave it thick there's no reason to leave it thick you spend your time getting these nice copes or miters real tight you don't want to leave a big bead in there where it's like a rounded over it looks like there's a huge gap you want to see that clean work all you're doing is filling in like the hairline cracks they are there that when you paint over it it'll look seamless that's all you're doing now that this corner is done it just looks way more seamless it looks like it fits into the wall and the ceiling like it's always been there before I put this caulking on you can see it looked pretty raw you could tell it was just installed but now it's like hey that actually looks like it belongs there which is the whole point don't overdo it and just keep it simple that's kind of my basic introduction to caulking those are kind of the things that come to mind when I think about teaching someone what they would want to know to get a nice clean line on mouldings when you're caulking and this goes for crown base casing chair rail panel moldings wainscot anything you're doing you're gonna want to have a nice tight line that's just filling in very small gaps that really are out of your control like ceiling joists like texture and things like that it's not really to fix mistakes although people use it for that a lot of times and it's just the less you can use the better but it is an asset and necessity in the world that we live in where we're not gonna have perfectly flush to the wall moldings and trim if you look at this area that I showed you on camera I mean that looks so clean now versus this Gap section over here I mean you could see where it's where the caulking stops and then the gap picks up again this just looks like wow it looks like it belongs and that looks like it's kind of raw you need to [ __ ] it so that's kind of where what does the whole purpose of this is is just to make things look like they belong there so hopefully you learned something from this video that's kind of the basic information that I wanted to share as far as caulking if you feel like I left something out leave a question below and I'll answer it and let you know if I have the answer to it so again thanks for watching and we'll see you on the next video which will probably be doing some trim work in this room installing this door at least so we'll see you on that one take care [Music]

Channel: Finish Carpentry TV

Views: 279,673

Keywords: how, to, caulk, crown, moulding, trim, work

Id: -pd_ANIzCWA

Length: 23min 28sec (1408 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019