walk the line

Back when John and I bought the house, we stared on the kitchen as our first project. You can see that adventure HERE. But when we started pulling off the wallpaper, along with it came all the caulking from  over the counters and above the sink. Because it was a transparent silicone, we were ok with it coming off, as long as we replace it. I had dreams of a beautiful, straight, bright white caulk line. My biggest fear when starting this project was having curvy caulk lines after all that work. I have this horrible OCD with wavy caulk lines. They bother me. Give me the shakes. With this in mind I did some homework.


Ranger Dad (he works for the park service here in NC, so for all intensive purposes, he'll be referred to has Ranger Dad) has worked in the construction business for over 20 years. He's done countless remodels in their house so I knew I could trust Ranger Dad to get some great advice on getting this perfect line. Well, I love Ranger Dad. He's great at so many things. Advice on how to do a project, not so much. He's one of those guys who'd rather do it than tell you how to do it. Ugh. This didn't help.


Ok, Google. My new best friend. I simply Googled how to do this and low and behold, I got a hit on one of my favorite blogs I already read. Young House Love. I love YHL. They are my idols of home DIY. If you haven't checked them out you should. But it was THIS post that gave me all the info I needed.


So with my new-found knowledge, I gathered my materials and grabbed John by the sleeve and headed to the kitchen. What? You don't grab your unsuspecting husband on the way through the house on a mission?
Anyways,

This is what you'll need:
Caulk
Painters tape
Damp paper towel
A wet finger (we kept a small cup of water for easy dipping)


Be sure to buy the correct type of caulk for the job. We stuck with a silicone caulk to be sure it kept out all the damp nasties from getting down in the wall. We trust DAP for all our caulking needs, this is what the tube looks like:

Next, we taped off where we wanted our line to go. Since I was after that CRISP line, this part was essential. So we checked, re-checked and checked again just to be sure.

Now comes the fun part. The caulking. John put on just enough caulk to seal the gap between the two layers of tape, but not so much it looked like a blob of toothpaste. It looked like this:

After getting it down, we needed to smooth it out. Enter the finger job. Yes, that's the technical term. John used a wet finger to swipe across the line of caulk. This displaces the caulk to create a nice finished line, and removes the access. The papertowel was used to clean off messy fingers as we went along.

Last step: The reveal.
At this point we were both crossing our fingers and toes that it worked. SLOWLY we pulled back the tape.

Voila. Worked like a charm. We couldn't have asked for better results.

Perfect.

The best part is, this project took only about 15 minutes start to finish. John went ahead and did the rest of the kitchen while we had everything out, and I must say it looks quite good. So in under 1 hour, we have a very safely sealed, water repelled, and beautifiully finished caulk line around the kitchen.

Thanks YHL for all the great tips!

So what do you think? Did we do OK? Anything you would change or do differently?