Hi, I’m Joe Wise, owner of Buildwise Construction.

We’re going to go over the proper methods of cleaning and prepping and get ready to caulk a tub today.

First of all, this area is becoming loose, we need to get them cleaned up and I’ll take a little razor knife here; you got to be careful that you don’t ruin the substrate that you’re dealing with and do a little scrape work here just to get the old caulk off. And you got to be careful that you don’t scratch your surface.

I have different types of knifes for this so that I can cut down on it and get that caulk out of there. If you don’t get this cleaned properly and got it prep properly, the new caulk won’t stick. A lot of times, when it gets on one side of this loose it will actually peel, and you could actually peel the caulk off. It doesn’t always work but sometimes.

If you don’t get this caulk off properly where your new caulk could go on there and adhere it properly to your substrate in your tub area, you’re going to have problems because the waters are going to infiltrate down underneath your substrate and cause damage.

I’m filling this caulk out of here, it’s not very fast but, you don’t want to do fast, you want to do good, you want it nice and clean. Here now I’m getting it nice and cleaned on there. I can’t really see what I’m doing here so I’m going to put some tub and tile cleaner. Spray it on there, let it sit for a second, then I’m going to wipe it up and see what we got.

We still got some few areas here that we need to heat. See how that’s turning loose, that means it’s not sticking really good, so you got to take the time to get that off of there. These areas don’t look too bad, they look like they were put on properly to begin with, so we’re just going to clean these areas.

You can already see how much better that looks some way after a few minutes of cleaning. When you start see how these cracks open up right here where the tub meets the substrate, and that’s why we’re going to go back and caulk. So now you want to do all away around the rest of the area, then clean your back splash and see what’s needs to be caulked there.

Next, we’re going to show you how to get the countertops and sinks prep and ready for caulk.