Understand Paint Cracking Causes

all right so we have a scenario right here where the paint actually did crack over the top of the caulking and i'm going to talk to you uh about uh why and uh and why we typically don't see this happen very often and when we over our um or when we paint over our caulking uh the caulking itself is a latex caulking it's a water-based product our paint is a water-based product so they're both compatible but the caulking is going to shrink and as it shrinks the paint is going to expand itself and it could crack but we don't see that except only with paints that are matte or flat based paints and the reason why is they don't have as much acrylic in those paints or resins to make some flexible the resins are what give it gives it a sheen and they got to take some of that stuff out so it looks flat or matte and then the paint just doesn't have that flexibility it's really rare that we ever paint with flat paints maybe once every you know two to three years this is a bathroom customer wanted it flat to have a certain look to it and we had to repair some caulking around the um granite countertops where there was a big gap and we used a urethane caulking and the urethane caulking is going to dry and not leave a tacky surface where the caulking is exposed so that's a whole other um thing we can talk about later but we repaired the caulking went back um we used frog tape so we'd get a really nice crisp clean line on the um on the granite here and we painted over the top of um the wet caulking uh it was in the caulking i'll show you it's tower urethane elastomeric sealant and it was a gray color and then the flat paint it did crack and once again it did crack because there's not enough resins um in the paint to actually uh give it some flexibility so it doesn't split and crack but we we see it and it's not um it's it all it's always gonna happen with flat paint it will never not happen it's a very easy fix and we're just