How to Replace Moldy Caulk in a Bathtub or Shower

hello and welcome to another of Ken's training today's training what we are going to do there's going to be two recaulk a bathtub so I'm going to show you the bathtub in a moment but basically the bottom line is is where the wall meets the tub there is the caulking has turned kind of brown it's molding out it's white cocking and it just it doesn't look attractive anymore so in order to get that clean white appearance we need to remove the existing caulk and then clean it and then reapply new and I'll show you all the steps involved the first thing I want to do is go over the tools needed for the job so the first tool you're going to need is and this will be in the process that you do it is this this tool here this material which is called liftoff caulk and sold at the Home Depot for like five dollars in the painting section so I'm going to spray this on the existing cocking now didn't read the directions carefully here you could leave it on for like an hour or so I may just leave it on overnight because it's not going to harm to leave it on longer if you needed the bathtub back in service same day you could just put it on for a few minutes to soften it up and then go from there okay so first product lift off this is going to soften up the existing caulking once that once you're ready to then pull off the caulking you're going to want to use a couple of tools I've got here one utility knife just a regular thumb open utility knife like that I also have a scraper with a brand new blade on it right there and that there is to get nice and flat this is good when you want to do for like cutting and so forth in case I don't want a putty knife I just want to scrape I just have a regular two inch putty knife in case I don't want to use a utility knife and I just want a putty knife I'll just I just have a two inch putty knife luck kind of like this it's kind of kind of a stiff blade and cutting there okay once I cut out all of the existing caulking that I need to clean it I'm gonna clean it with alcohol and some paper towels just to let it dry up really nice and get it nice and clean once the surface is nice and clean I'm gonna use some tape this is just a one-inch tape or three quarters of an inch something like that blue tape and I'm just gonna lay it down and before I put my bead of caulking down to get it in there nice and tight once the tape is down I'm just going to put on some rubber gloves just so I can work kind of clean and then I want to use my to apply the caulking okay now there's two different types of caulking on the market the cheap stuff the first the stuff that first catches your eye is this tube here which is in bright white and here's the labeling on it right there DAP and so forth and this tube here is an acrylic latex caulk and it is it's clean it cleans up with water the bottom line is is that it's not a good waterproof work this is four dollars at the Home Depot in the painting section but it is not the one that you want to use I just wanted to show you for illustration purposes again that one was four dollars this is the one or one of this quality you do want to use this is a 100% pure silicone caulk and again sold at the Home Depot I got the same color is going to be white because that's about Todd that I'm working in is white and the reason this particular one was $9 this was the most expensive one the reason why I went with the most expensive one is because this one has a 10-year mold free product protection so it's supposedly not supposed to mold out for ten years there was another can container of a silicone here a tube of caulking for silicone but it was a $2 cheaper and but it only had a five year warranty so I thought you know I got to go through I'm gonna go through all this effort why not buy the best product and see if I it gives me the most longest lasting results if it if I get a few more years out of it and it was you know an extra $3 or $2 for the tube that's fine so be it so anyways these are all the materials that you need oh and then to put the cocking on of course you need your handy-dandy trusty cocking gun so those are all the materials I'm going to show you the show you the bathtub and then we'll go from there alright so here is the bathtub and right there is the area of concern right where the wall meets the tub that is the cocking that I'm going to be removing so this is right here at the beginning of the jug that's what it's supposed to look like that's nice bright white that's what the whole thing is going to be looking like when I'm done and then you see over here it gets a little more grungy er this probably isn't the worst one in the world is probably tubs out there that are much much worse than this but I just want to bring the life of this that this whole tub is in very good condition actually outside of that so I want to bring this whole thing back up to 100% cleanliness standards so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put this product on right here lift off silicone foam sealant remover and I'm just going to apply this all on that okay I've been letting the the remover sit on here for about one hour and I'm going to get right to it right now and start scraping and I'll start it a little bit of the scraping process right now okay I'm working solo here no one's behind the camera so I'm gonna hopefully you're gonna pick this up so basically let's see here I'm just using a very sharp utility knife and I am just going to cut in here like this and then cut down for my first pass here and also got this yeah so I can make sure it cleans up really nice much that's the process I'm just going to keep going through the all the way around the tub like this just to get it nice and clean like I'm in a big hurry or anything just take my sonic and get all that mold and mildew off and get right down to the tub and the tile without damaging anything just being careful and then and then I'll wipe everything down so not exactly the most glamorous step but that's that's what I want to do okay so here's an update of where and I've gone around removing as much as I can't could with the scraper and utility knife so here's what it looks like from that perspective now I'm going through and doing a cleaning so all the old been removed now let me explain what I'm gonna do here and I'll show you on this section right here so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put on a pair of safety glasses and I'm going to use an old toothbrush and I want to take some rubbing alcohol 90% put some here in the cap about that much put this over here then I'm going to take and scrub inside the hole here and everything where I want the cocking to attach to and I'm going to clean this and get this as clean as I can so this way everything is just going to be as tight a seal as possible here clean this up as best I can take a clean paper towel go through wipe that down and I'm gonna go around the tub like this so I'm just giving you an illustration here in this section but basically I'm going around the whole tub with that with what you just saw right there oh and one other thing that I should mention that when you're doing this project when I'm off-camera I got the radio on and I'm relaxed and and I'm not stressed or anything like that so you just want to put a lots of comfortable music when you do this job I mean you kind of you're doing it alone anyway so it's I just want to make yourself as comfortable as possible while you're doing your job that way you'll won't feel stressed or rushed and you'll have a better quality product and result that's us SOP standard operating procedure for me anyways alright so anyways that's what I'm going to do right now and I'll show you the next step when I get to it okay so here we are after cleaning with the the alcohol this is what the growth joking looks like just before I go to put the the tape on I just wanted to kind of give you a little bit of detail about how it looks like it was fussy in the corners and you can still see how dark that looks I'm hoping when I'm done that with the caulking that's all going to look nice and just clean and white so you're not gonna see that contrast that you see right now alright so I just wanted to give you an overview so now the next step is for me the tape and I'll give you an illustration over here when I do that okay so here we go with the taping process and I'm gonna put two rows of tape on here one at the bottom and one on the tile I'll start with the one here at the bottom I don't want a big amount of distance maybe about an eighth of an inch approximately between the corner and where the tape is so I'm trying to judge this just right so I get that exactly where I want looks fine and then kind of just go a little bit at a time here and I'm getting close to the corner all right just use a short little piece when I come back here like this approximately like that so that one is there yes I can turn that out a little bit I put a little extra on there by accident let me just cut that that would be a nice straight line and now for the one at the top basically same thing about an eighth of an inch or so is the distance that I'm looking for because I don't want a massive amount of caulking to be on this just enough to get a good seal and hopefully left oh if I can get it for five years it wonderful I could get it for ten years I'd be great let's just go shoot for five and we'll start with that so basically that's the process right there I'm going to continue doing that the whole way through for the whole tub so I'll go off camera right now but I give you an idea of what that is supposed to resemble how much distance there and so forth that you're trying to go trying to attain in order to do it all right and then of course I'll be a little fussy there in the corner there and so forth then I'll show you that when I'm done all right here you go the whole Cape the whole tub is taped up around where I want to put my Hocking this is basically what it looks like give you a little bit of detail on the corner there so you see I tried to maintain the same equal spacing all the way through when I when I do the the job now let me show you how to apply the caulking again let's start over here in this corner here give me about that type of a shoe and prepping the the tube of coffee is very important you want to make sure that you get prepped up properly okay so here's the in that my cocking gun pull the cap off now here I want not a very big opening into this so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to cut like this I have a truck route right in there me right so here is the size of the tip that I created there now on some of these including this one - there's a there's a small tin foil shield in here that needs to be broken by the way I've already put on my gloves so now that I'm getting ready to work with silicone put the gloves on so on the cocking gun itself built in at the very tip here is this metal rod you just take that after you've cut your tip off and puncture that down and and you try and you're breaking that small tin foil seal that's right in here that which keeps your silicone nice and fresh oh by the way always check your expiration dates when working with silicone this one here is used by 4:15 so 2015 April and this is 2014 so I have no problems with the expiration date on this so cone you never want to use expired silicone I used that once and have a never setup it never worked properly so I had to remove it and then start over from scratch and you don't want to do that so just don't even steroid that by working with nice silicone now by the way this particular type of caulking gun is the top is the type that I like it's the one that does not have the little ridges it just has a smooth right here like this one the best okay so now I'm going to put this here in my cocking gun with the tip going towards the joint I'll start here in the corner and I'll pull my first run along here this will be a little bit of the headache for me let me see yeah when I get to there it's gonna kind of mess up on me so I'll have to bring it down underneath that okay so again I'm going to knock this is white cocking I've already the joint is nice and clean okay here we go and just about that much is what I'm gonna do here let me do this whole row to show you how to get this proper once you get towards the end of where you want your gun to shut off hold on a second here what you want to do is you want to relieve the pressure of the tube by depressing that right there and then I always have the when I when I have an open tube of silicone or whatever cocking and got nervous have some paper towels rags whatever right nearby so that it's easy for me to you know hold on to that all right and then what I'll even do is when I lay it down on the ground I'll lay it down with the - with a paper towel directly under it so that if it does lose out loses help not on the ground but on the paper towel so I'm just going to set this aside I have a whole roll of paper towels right near me so this way have them available now this joint looks terrible okay this is not an attractive joint so what I'm gonna do is just take my finger and I'm just gonna rub that in along there smooth that up now the silicone that I'm working with here is not acrylic latex but it's 100% pure silicone meaning that it is not water clean up the one that's acrylic latex that particular one is water clean up so this one you cannot use water for the cleanup they say you use mineral spirits now basically what I'm going to do that's very close to being the the final product but I still I want to pull off my tape I like to pull my tape off while it's still wet so what I'm going to do is I'm going to continue doing the rest of the tub and then I'm going to come back here pull the tape off see how it looks and if I need to just touch it one more time I'll touch it one more time very gently and then I'll let it set up overnight and then that's the final product right there okay this went fairly quickly only took me about five minutes and that's all done with the cocking all the way around alright now what I want to do it's only just been a few minutes and it feels like it's already starting to set up I actually want to pull out my my tape right now so what I'm gonna do I've got a trash can right near me right over to here so what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna very gently pull this out like this and see it leaves that little gap there I want to smooth that with my finger so this way it comes out as smooth as possible the tape gives you the best looking job that's why we use the tape right there okay now the bottom one is off now I'm going to pull off the top one [Music] all right now the top comes off with a very clean finger here what I'm going to do they're going to take it I'm just going to try to push it all the way through with one clean swoop to get it nice and smooth and it here really nicely all right almost there right there and then follow that all the way through pretty much that is the final product right there and I'm just going to follow that through and do the rest of the tub show you this section over here just the corners I'm a little unhappy about the corner right here I'm just going to try to clean that up a little bit it's not bad but just trying to get that a little bit better that looks a little short on cocking is what it looks everything else I'm pretty happy with all right so that's just about it here's your final product showing you nice and detailed what that looks like there's that corner right there and moving through the tub I mean it kind of that this looks a lot better than before much much much much better than before it's a nice bright white no mildew seal I'm pretty much happy with everything except for this corner right here I want to put a little bit more on that corner but I don't want to go too crazy so let me show you how I'm gonna do that alright so with the camera focused right there I'm just gonna take my cheese of talking I put the cap on it pull the cap off put that aside for a second and with just a small amount of silicone there we go just going to put a small amount of silicone right there and then I'll come back the other way and do that to relief that release that pressure you put that down you're a paper towel real quick go now let me see if I can't get that just a little bit better right there that's not bad I can live with that right like that that looks pretty good all right I don't want to keep fussing with it there's no part I might cause more damage than I want to okay so let me give you a little zoom in on that oops go the other way and so there's that final product right there okay that concludes the video I hope you enjoyed watching the video and you can go ahead and tackle your own tub right now and you know exactly how to do it and I think the results came out pretty good I'm pretty satisfied with the results if you did like the video please click on like give me a nice symmetrical likes I have a channel with other videos training videos if you want to check that out my youtube channel is Ken training and and that's it and I'll see you later you

Channel: KenTraining

Views: 1,371,775

Rating: 4.7015114 out of 5

Keywords: Shower, Bathtub, Caulking, recaulk, clean up, clean, plumbing, bathroom, rest room, wall, Demo bathroom, fix rotted sub floor, install a sheet vinyl linoleum floor, remove old tile tub shower surround and install a new cement board underlayment, CBU, then waterproof with redguard, install new porcelain tile and grout, use a wet tile saw, drywall patching and painting, remove a door and install a wall plus baseboard molding, install new bathroom vanity with dual sink

Id: 2atcFawue3U

Length: 27min 17sec (1637 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 17 2014