WHY Caulk Your Tape? Painting Perfect Lines From A to Z

this Christie Idaho pain around paint like TV today is a good video on caulking your tape you know as a painter we use caulking as a painter we use tape but should you use caulking and tape together to get really straight lines this video is gonna go over that method I'm gonna talk you know some ends about ins and outs on it when we use it when we don't use it and how to actually do that method to get perfectly straight lines and just talk then depth about it so stay tuned for this video if you haven't subscribed for our channel to our channel hit the subscribe button hit the notification Bell because if you don't hit the subscribe and the notification it really doesn't do anything you're not gonna get notified next time they come out with a new video it's free simple easy to do and any of the tools and accessories I'm using in the video if you ever want to learn more about them just check out the comment section down below and if you've got questions or comments about this video or any other video leave them down in the comment section below but that's going with the video now alright so here we go I'm gonna show you some tips and tricks and the method I use using frog tape and clear caulking so I've got a surface right here this is a really rough wall this would be have not concerned maybe I've knocked down but this is a really heavy orange peel texture now you can try to cut that line in it's gonna take you a long time and nearly impossible to get a perfectly straight line on that and I'm actually gonna even do a curved line right here you see blue tape by here frog tape has two different types of frog tape now they got blue frog tape and green frog tape there is a cost difference because this is contractor pacs it's not a premium paper but it's the same thing they both have the paint block technology on the outside of the tape it's a product a polymer that swells up when liquid hits it so on these bumpy surfaces paint can't leak underneath there but when you get a rough surface like this you may still get some strain leakage here and there because you've got some really heavy peaks and valleys so when you put your tape out you definitely want to push down on it but that's where the your caulking comes into play and why I use clear pocket and it just adds that added measure of sealing your tank now there's some tips and tricks when it comes to using clear caulking and how you got to go about doing it to be effective I know some people out there and utilize pre-wetting they're tape so you get your tape on there and you can take a wet sponge and I can just rub a wet sponge over this and that will activate that polymer and it will swell up and it kind of does the same thing is caulking but the caulking itself is thick and so it's even going to be more effective when it when it comes to filling in those peaks and valleys I'm gonna use green frog tape I really like it's a green I like the paper on the green a little bit better than the blue it's a little bit thinner and when you pull your tape because it's thinner it doesn't leave as big of a dam and when you're using coffee and this is kind of important the dam is when you pull the tape off the ridge that is left from the caulking to the part that's not talking you're gonna have this Ridge and that's called the dam the smaller the dam the less likely you're gonna see it so the thinner of the paper the smaller the dam so this this if you're using frog tape to get clean lines again you're not using clear caulking the blue tape is very effective like on smooth surfaces and stuff because it still has that polymer on the outside I'm just gonna take a mask align this line to be straight I'll just you know simulate you can see how you can even curve frog on green paper better than the blue so we've got a line right here so now I've got my line and this is once again a very bumpy surface so I'm gonna just press my tape down and this would be really impossible to get a straight line on so got my coffee frog tape and then I actually just do will do all Fable do one with three wedding will do one with nothing and then you wanna with clear quality but we can even see the difference these a good test right there I've never actually used the pre-wedding method I've always used clear talking now if you have between like baseboards I've got white baseboards down here if you have like a gap in there in that baseboard and you're using your caulking to fill the gap and then paint over clear caulking shrinks quite a bit and it doesn't fill as much as the white coughing does and so sometimes we'll use white coffee but we only use white talking if they're surface we're masking over is white anything other than white we use clear so one of the key things that getting straight lines right before you paint you should always you know pressure take down with your hands I'm going to take and caulk one of the tapes right here I'll good caulking the top one what I actually do caulking I'm doing a lot of it I do like to wear rubber gloves I use latex gloves I really like the Raven gloves big fan of those gloves so I use Raven gloves because I just don't want cocking all of my hands and if you actually read the SDS on caulking this up you know there are some things in caulking that you probably don't want on your hands absorbed into your body your liver and your kidneys and stuff so did I get to wear rubber gloves especially when you've been talking okay so here we go this is just clear talking and this is a high quality coffee now the keys is I don't want to put a big you know be too cuffing on here because I'm actually wiping all the caulking away the only thing we're actually doing is trying to fill those voids along this edge and that's what our coffee does so it's just a small bead of caulking that we're gonna wipe off the more caulking there is the more its kind of smear around with your brush and stuff and you don't want that effect so I'm just gonna take it just put a nice very small bead of caulking on there you can kind of see it this is there's not very much on there and it doesn't have to be perfectly straight because you're going to wipe it you know over so whether you're on the wall or on the on the tape it doesn't really matter now my talking's on there just take my hello and I like to have you wet rag or something I can just wipe my iam on too so I'm just gonna wipe it on the press and get all of it off there's only gonna be black like a thin residue left on this tape right here so the cocking swiped on there so this is a really rough surface so we'll see if we have any success so that one's down right there and I'm gonna take it free wet the blue one with this pretty wet the blue one and we'll leave the bottom of green one now some of the keys to using this method of using the caulking you have to paint over the coffee before it dries this is critical if it dries when you go to peel it off it's gonna bridge from here to here because this is gonna glue itself from the tape to the wall and you're gonna peel it off in what we call like sharp teeth on here and those are all going to be touch-ups so now that it's on there I want to begin painting over that caulking you know right away so I'm just gonna paint my wall do what this just could simulate baseboards it could be window trim it could be just anything wherever it could be just stripe on a wall and I don't want to use a whole lot of force and I'm not taking my brush and really pushing on it because I don't want to force you know my paint underneath the tape so I'm just like brushing it lightly I would typically if I was you know rolling the wall this was around the trim I'm gonna back roll over this you know I'm gonna roll with a four inch roller and then roll my wall so we only activated the top so we're not gonna be looking at the bottoms we're gonna be looking at the tops so I'm gonna tell you it like right now it's um I'm just working right along on this top one one of the key things with this method like I said is do not let your caulking dry so typically you cannot do a whole room and caulk it and then come back like if you're doing baseboards window trim this up and then come back and pay is your gonna have that bridging effect and you're gonna get sharp teeth pulls on it and then you're gonna have a lot of touch-up so you don't we typically work just one wall at a time if you have two guys going doing this method you can work two walls at a time but we're typically working one wall at a time so key element you cannot let the caulking dry before you pull the tape now the second key element is you cannot let the paint dry before you pull the tape or you're gonna have the same effect how'd you get a lot of questions you were to say well it's going to crack typically on 99% of the walls we do the the paint's are satin paints there's a lot of acrylic and satin paints they're very flexible just like the caulking is flexible so and then the two components we got latex coffee and underneath here and then we've got latex paint on the top they both are compatible they both dry at the same time the same rate and we don't get any cracking or any splitting using satin paints this is a satin paint right here so that's if you do use flat paint you may get some cracking using flat paint so we've used flat paints in the pack pass with this method and we'll just go back and touch up where it does crack but we've had success we've been doing this method for probably 15 years and never had an issue with the coffee in incompatible if you use the silicone caulking it's not gonna work we use a latex paint a latex caulking with the latex paint so it's a water-based made this is not an oil-based paint so now I'll pull off the top one and you can see my perfectly straight line on an extremely bumpy service now you can see the bottom where it actually bled through right there because it didn't have any poppy on it and you can see how bad that is now let's try pulling the blue tape off this was pre wetted and so it's so that's people in it so there's a few spots that it's like doing right here because these were too big of valleys that the tape is swelling on the tape the polymer couldn't fill that in you can see the bottom of it there's more bleeding because I didn't wet the bottom so that's I mean if you can get a close-up and you can feel this wall that is extremely bumpy and that's still pretty ineffective so that blue tape is very effective for giving you a clean line I can take and just touch those things up fairly quickly so I can use that tape make that line and touch those little things up a lot faster than I can try to hand cutting that line here's frog tape down here alone that doesn't have no water or no clear caulking so to me this is not a bad line on this bumpy surface it's thick the thickness of the tape made that strainer in some areas right there but you got a little bit of bleeding you can see the difference using clear caulking and this is why we use clip caulking is to get that perfectly straight line absolutely amazing you see it's got a little bit of a dam there the ridge that's left behind the quick talking puts amazing in fact perfectly straight lines some of the questions I'll get is you know this was the baseboard and this is the wall you know now that I pulled my tape what if I have to to coat my walls so if I have to to coat my walls I know that in advance I'm gonna be rolling my wall down to you know about a quarter of an inch from where my masking already is in the put my first coat on my cut ends will be done next and then while my cut in is wet then I'll roll my second coat onto the wall and then I'll pull my tape that way I don't get any stippling on the baseboards now you will see us do this method on and do a second coat we'll take and pull the tape you'll do a few before and some certain circumstances in some of my videos you've probably seen that but we're using a very high quality paint a very high quality roller I like the premiere rollers in the Audio pane were using in the rollers they do not be you know any stippling or any splatter on the baseboards and so we can get away with it but best practices as always you know tape roll your first coat come down to about a quarter of an inch and then do all your cut ends and we work wall the wall if you're by yourself you're gonna have to work one wall do that whole wall and then move to the next walk your two people you can typically work two walls at a time I do a lot of people ask me what paint brush I like and on interiors really like the premiere Montauk this is a Montauk's which is a 9 X and Oreo blend brush and a great brush from premiere so there you have it some of the tips and tricks that have worked for me for the last 15 years painting perfectly straight lines and what this does and I know some of you people out there gonna argue you know brush and roll or I can cut in the straight line I can do this I can do that some people are gonna think I'm you know eliminating the need for the guy you know that can handle a brush this does not this just makes effective members of your team quickly I can teach you know kid up the street the high school Community College get how to do this method in about two to two or three weeks you'll be doing that around doors door jambs window trim and baseboards and you actually start making a company money right off the bat it's very effective we always need somebody's you're the professional the journeyman that's got five years of experience cutting and sealing lines because they're sealing lines are always cut in by hand there's always a need for the guy with the brush we're not eliminating that journeyman so don't be afraid so Chris I hear the this painter on YouTube who has this awesome trip with tape and call T to get perfectly straight lines you know what I think I've seen some of this videos and I think I've heard that trick actually works did we go by that guy's family so here we are we're going to talk about our coffee and tape method of getting perfectly straight lines how we go about doing it and try to answer some the mysteries and some of the questions about this method that we keep getting so we got a reference that we can just tell people to go to here online hey boy do we get questions a whole lots of questions um what is the tape we use we use frog tape and we use 3m 20/20 tape when did we use these two tapes John so typically what we'll tell our guys is default to the 20/20 tape but we'll use frog tape any time where the the trim is freshly painted so like we'll have sprayed the trim and if we're trying to get some of those lines done that day will use frog tape because the adhesives a little bit gentler or anytime we're working on something that's metal or like a like a stain wood because it just gives us that extra protection of sealing up that tape and making sure we've got nice crystal clear lines and one of the reasons between the two tapes too is this is a production tape it's only about a buck twenty year old this some I think we pay maybe like four or five dollars a roll for this yeah and um this has like this magic pixie dust on it that is on the outside edges of the tape super cool that swells and it keeps paint or it keeps the caulking from bleeding underneath so this is an amazing tape it's really good for smooth surfaces like glass and so then we use two different types of caulking and one of the caulking says of clear caulking and one is a white caulking and clear caulking the clear a lot of people are we aren't getting people from other parts of the world that say that they didn't even know clear coffee and exists or they can't even get it you don't have to use clear caulking but there are some situations when it is highly recommended and that's on like going over stained wood yeah some like what would you think any time so we'll use clear any time when the tram or the wall color is not white or similar to a white so if you've got stained wood or if you've got a trinket like some people have a dark trim color something like that we don't want that little white line of caulking to show up and the clear shouldn't be confused with silicone which is not paintable so you want to look for a paintable clear latex caulk and a lot of people get confused when we're using fair caulking because it comes out white but try and clear and so I get it addressed and it's it's amazing all these magic things that these painting companies come up with but it's you'll see it will be wiping it and it's gonna be white but it does in a few hours it'll dry clear and one of the reasons why we don't use clear all the time because you may ask why don't we always use clear the clear versus white the white caulking is a lot thicker and there's a reason why we like a thicker copying John what is that it builds it lasts a little bit longer to me just and then it doesn't shrink as much like to me the clear caulking because it's there's less body and it's mostly acrylic it dries that clear but it shrinks quite a bit and that's where you might run into some problems with any gaps so if you've got a gap between your trim and your wall that that clear doesn't really hold that gap as well as a white work yep so eventually when the caulking and the paint dries it's gonna the clear is gonna shrink a lot more and you may have to go back over it and redo it so that's why we wouldn't use clear 100% of the time is beep is to me the shrink ability of it extremes a lot so we're gonna walk you through some of the processes and how we go about doing it and we're gonna show you we do get a lot of questions people will be asking us you know when do we do jet method and we use it we've got right here situations we've got a door jamb and we got baseboards in these walls but we've already done the walls and some people gonna have a question well why aren't we doing that first why are we doing last and there's a lot of different I guess scenarios what we would call it why we do what we do and what we walk into each house the majority of the time you know we're gonna do it one way but they're arguably certain situations where we would change our method and this would be one and we have a light color and explained on with the light color and why we're not concerned about maybe like a lowing and stuff like that yeah so typically two things we've got going for us one we're using a product that's self levelling and so it has a bit longer of an open time it levels out so I'm a little less worried about issues like differences in stippling - it's a light color so anytime we've got a light color or I've got a color that uses a lot of natural oxides as the pigment you don't have to worry about the way those those pigments lay out and flashing and that's typically what's happening with haloing you're using blacks blues greens reds things that aren't really natural pigments and those things that's where you'll end up seeing those issues so that's when we're really careful about our process to make sure we do our cuttings first and then roll the fields last this color it's it's very very natural it's light we don't have those issues and so we have the freedom it's one of those things you just you get creative you experiment a little bit and you try new things we know with this color we've got the freedom we can work ahead rollin which is great because we had sprayed the trim what we needed to buy some time while that was drying well we can just start rolling walls and ceilings and then come back in after that trim set up and start trimming those pieces out yeah so this paint that we use in the product is and the color is very forgiving so we can roll these walls we will these walls yesterday we could come back and do these cut ends and you're not gonna see any haloing you don't have to worry about keeping a wet edge if you're using dark colors our process is…