Stop Messy Caulk Lines! The Sponge Method Pros Use on Trim

Early on, I had this one employee doing the caulking and he was just wiping it on his pants. It was insane. By the end of the day, his brand new pair of pants were completely covered in caulking. Now, that's the whole point of this sponge. I got to get rid of the excess somewhere. I'm getting rid of it on the sponge, which can be cleaned out after every single door jam I do. I clean out my sponge. I start fresh. But it also serves even another more important purpose and that's lubricating your hands, keeping them wet while you're tooling your caulking and wet fingers. Wet hands makes it a lot easier to tool your cocking. So I'm uh using the sponge. Everything you know we coaul in here is use the same technique using these tools right here. The door jambs, uh window sills, closets, baseboards. So I'll just start right here. begin applying a bead of coauling. Getting this gap completely full. Now I'll begin tooling it. I'm going to wet my finger. This is where it's extremely important. Wet your finger. Very light push. Lay it out. But come up to the corner. Come back down. Lay it out. Every single time. Wipe your finger. Get rid of the excess cocking. I'm going to come into the corner, press it in. Every time I swipe, I'm going to wipe. Get rid of the cocking, excess cocking. And what happens is I keep wiping. I'm keeping wetting my cocking. I can keep working it. It's not going to dry as long as I keep wiping it. Make sure your cocking tip is clean. Your cocking tip will mess up your bead. Also lay your 45° angle down flat where you're putting the cocking. I could just come right back up cuz I ended there. I could come right back up if I wanted. Come into the corner. Come back down. Wipe clean. Wipe clean. Starting to get a lot of cocking built up. I'm going to clean the sponge and clean my hands. Bring it out. What I don't want to do, I want this cocking sponge to be super super wet. I don't want it to be all completely 100% rung out. That's if I was like really really ringing it out. I want it wetter than that. I want that some of that excess water cuz that's what's going to be lubricating my hands. So, kind of like a medium squeeze. And then I'm going to start off with fresh hands. What you don't want to start off with is what we call cocking boogers all over your hands. And what happens is if you got cocking all over your hands, that's going to be causing you to not get a very smooth bead. Anything obstructing the soft pads of your fa uh fingers is going to make it so you can't get a really good bead. Big stretch is one of the um caulkings and sealants that will stretch more than just about any product out there on the market. So, we'll span these big gaps. It bonds extremely well. So, there going to be any separation. It's going to be gluing. Sometimes you got stuff like this that's a little bit loose. It's going to glue seal that all back together. So now I'm going to come across. I'm going to be running out here pretty soon. So want to make sure I have another cocking tube available to me quickly. I can feel heat coming out of this vent. Looks like I'm out now. I got to get another cocking tube refill. Here comes the refill from Noah. So, new caulking tube, really important. This is really important to the success of getting the perfect bead of caulking. 45° angle. Cut your caulking tube. Get like a 45° angle on it. It's pretty important to have that angle cut correctly. I don't want to have like it flat. I like a 45° angle. That 45°ree angle is going to lay right up against your bead. You're going to start pumping the caulking in to completely fill the crack 100%. So now this is where I got a big gap. Going to fill this big gap. Not big enough to put like backer rod in, but big enough that big stretch will actually span that gap, not separate, not split or crack. It's why I like big stretch. Now, you'll pay a little bit more for it, but there's nothing worse than getting call backs on your job fixing stuff cuz your cocking failed. So, do the carpenters favor and use a good caulking. Also, make their big gaps look good. So part of the art of, you know, caulking and putting the bead of cocking on to begin with is knowing like how fast to actually pull your gun and matching that with your trigger pull. So if I, you know, have a slow trigger pull and move too fast, what's going [snorts] to happen is I'm have a bead of cocking that looks like this, that's not going to actually fill the crack right there. And there's a good chance that any movement in the house that that could actually separate. What I want to do is I want to slow down, put more cocking in where it's actually going to fill that gap inside and it's going to touch more of this both sides of that gap. So, so that's a nice good smooth bead right there. And if I just take light pressure with a wet finger tool that I'm pressing it down into the crack farther. Now you can see I got a nice fill there where I went too fast. I didn't have as good of a fill right there. When I do this for multiple days, uh, my fingers start to crack and they start to hurt. There's nothing worse than your hands hurting. And I use this product right here, uh, Workman's Friend, uh, barrier skin cream. So, I take I'm going to dry my hands off. I put it on multiple times. I put it on twice today. It kind of creates a barrier on your hands that help um them from drying out, cracking out, helping the chemicals from not causing your fingers to dry and crack as much. side put y some of this on just a little bit. Rub it in. And then I'm going to let it dry and begin caulking again. Hey, this is Chris the Idaho Painter. Hopefully you enjoyed this video. This is one of many videos out of my new construction course, everything you need to know about a painting a new construction interior. If you want to see that course, it's over and available at paintlifeupply.com. Hopefully you enjoy this video.