How to Properly Caulk & Seal a New Construction Home | Save Thousands with The Idaho Painter

All right. In this video, I'm going to be talking about how to properly coaul an exterior, how to get a perfect coaulking bead on an extra- sighted home. So, I have a home right here in front of me, and we have multiple examples of the worst exterior caulking job I literally have ever seen in my in my entire life. I think this is a good opportunity to do a video uh to show you the bad and then to show you how to properly do it. I can do this. this I can show you the bad cuz I would never want to do this in somebody's home and show you how not to do it because you're going to see the bad, you know, once you paint it. And you know, one of the great things about this siding right here, it's a wood um it's not actual wood. It's a um wood material or wood product that looks like wood, but it's got a lot of grain to it. And you can easily coaul with gloves, which is really nice. I don't like getting caulking all over my hands. I don't like the chemicals from caulking being on my bare skin. So, I always with gloves doing exteriors. And one of the beauties about that is I can take put some caulking, you know, right in the middle of that, I can move it around, it still looks like the grain itself. And when I paint over that, even though you see a big white spot, when you paint over it, you literally will not see it. It's um literally impossible to see it if it's done right. Now, if you do it like this right here, that was a little nail head, like a little pen right here, and there's a huge swipe of caulking right there, a gigantic mark of caulking, and the person just ran their finger over the whole thing and completely filled in the wood grain. That's literally, you can't get rid of that. That will show as a flat shiny spot, a flat spot like right on the grain. It's kind of like going into a textured house. Say you got an orange peeled texture house and you got a hole a nail hole in the wall and you take a spackle knife, you know, inch and a half and you put a swipe of spackle right across the orange peel texture and you don't wipe it off with a sponge and leave it just in the hole. You're going to see a big flat spot on your wall. It's going to look worse than the hole look to begin with. That's going to look worse than that actual little hole that now shows up as a spot this big instead of a little tiny hole. You I can try to fix this. I can put some caulking on there. Now I can move it up and down with the grain and I can turn that into a grain look and attempt to fix that. How painstaking is of a process is that going to be to attempt to work out all these? I would literally charge the builder probably $800 to fix this mess. So just going to give you some tips on, you know, properly caulking on a substrate like this. So, if I have a seam, you on here, this is already been cocked, but I'm just going to put a small bead on this seam. And to fill that seam, the grain runs up and down. So, I want to take and wipe my bead of caulking up and down in an up and down motion with the grain. And I'm going to allow my finger to actually bump the caulking and actually create a grained effect to it. So, if I had a nail head, say right in the middle, right say right here. I'll fill that nail head right there, and I just want to fill the nail head. Now, just fill it right there. Move it up and down. I want to move the caulking up and down, not side to side. My my grain doesn't go side to side. My grain goes up and down, and I want to leave some ridges in there to get it to match the grain. So people will see me coaul I and I'm a big believer in overcocking and not undercocking. So I caulk a lot. I'll put a lot lot of caulking on there, you know, compared to probably uh most people you'll ever see caulk cuz I take and hide it really well, you know, with how I actually apply it. But I I want it to fill what I want it to fill. I want it to bond to both sides of or whatever it's filling and I don't want it to separate over time. And so I like to coaul and I like to overcock. So there is a right way and a wrong way. So I have an example right here. I'm trying to fix, you know, this mess. Also, this is, you know, a situation too. Right here, we've got um two pillars right here that are exposed to rain and snow. And when I'm caulking on something like this, the rain and snow will have a tendency to sit on horizontal surfaces like this, which these aren't meant to have snow sitting on it. It's not meant to have water sitting on it, but it will cuz it's exposed to all that. So, when I'm caulking right here, I'm caulking, I'm creating a large enough bead that the water will run off. It kind of creates a profile right there that it'll run off. But, anytime I'm caulking, say even this bead right here. I'm trying to fix this bead. I'm going to put a large enough bead of caulking in there. I'm going to come down to these corners. I want these corners to be, you know, extremely full right here. I'm going to come down with my glove. I'm not going to push very hard cuz I don't want it to smooth out. I kind of want it to look like grain. I moved it out right here. You don't have a lot of time cuz the caulking start to dry really fast in the sun. I push it down. I'm filling it in just like that. If I have any excess, I'm going to wipe this excess off someplace. I never like don't ever wipe this on your clothes. It's one of the um rules of the thumb. That's why my clothes look like they do cuz I do not get rid of excess caulking on me. I'll find good places to put it, useful places to put it. Literally, if I didn't have any place to put it, I'll find like the backside of the set or I'll find something like I can take this, get rid of it right here to try to fix this guy's problem right here. The guy that should not have a caulking gun in his hand. I'll try to help eliminate that. That's going to help eliminate that. If I have more, I'm going to get rid of it someplace. I can begin just wiping it on here. I don't want anything on my fingers. One of the keys to being able to coaul and well is not to get this all built up on your gloves cuz that's going to really mess up your caulking bead. Your fingers want to be clean. So, I'll typically sometimes just find some place on the siding to clean my glove. Wipe my glove off. I want it to be clean. I want the sides of it to be clean. Just like that. So, I've been cocking for a while out here and you can see my gloves. I don't get a whole lot on me. That finger because I've been out here videoing talking. It's getting a little built up on it. It starts to dry. It will just roll off. My gloves are clean just like a clean finger. But those little boogers on the end right there will mess up your caulking bead if you want a smooth caulking bead. I don't need 100% smooth caulking bead because, you know, I've got wood grain here. So, I'm going to fill that nail hole. I'm going to work it back and forth. This This grain is going this direction. So, I'm going to work it side to side that direction. The grain here is going up and down. This it's going up and down. So, I'm going to work it up and down. This side to side. I see this all over up here. We've got it, you know, examples all over here. Um, I mean, I've got examples where the guy smeared it with three fingers, two fingers, but we've got examples where up here, you can see where the caulking was smeared sideways. That's going to show up. Take work this up and down into the grain. That'll never show up right there. So, that's how to properly caulk your siding. Doesn't matter whether it's white all over the place. The house is going to be painted. It's not gonna Some people think that it'll create like a shiner. Um, some people think that it will eventually show through the paint. Now, if you use I know and I've used some caulkings and some sealants in the past that had really bad problems with the plasticizers in the sealant rising to the surface of the paint and um eventually creating a shiny spot in the paint. And it was um a problem with the sealant itself. And I'm not going to name the sealant here in the video. I don't want to call anybody out, but it was a major problem with um a lifetime warranty sealant that I was using with the plasticizers rising to the top. And then in we even had a problem with you know on caulking like this in cool mornings the uh paint because of the the high plasticizer content and the caulking the paint would bead away you know from the caulking and we had to wait for it to warm up to it wouldn't actually what we call fisheye and stuff. But the sealant I use I'm using big stretch right here. Never had a problem ever ever with plaster sizers or shiners or um fisheye or even years down the road having shiny spots wherever the cocking is. These beads right here, I don't need to make these look like grain. I don't want them to be rough cuz I want the water to like run off and kind of help resolve this inherent problem. You know, with this, you know, in my personal opinion, you have a situation like this, these post, you know, holding up this overhang. We should have had brick going all the way up and then you won't have horizontal surfaces right here. This is going to over the years begin to swell if you don't try to help resolve it with um sealant. So, there's a little bit about um caulking, how to caulk the perfect bead, the perfect nail head, and get amazing looking sealant, an amazing looking paint job with your caulking. And