It’s not the size of the caulk

… well actually, in this case it is. Today I’ve begun the grueling task of recaulking the bathtub. This would be an annoying task in any case, but it’s been made 3,000 times more annoying by the slipshod job the previous owners did. (Slipshod! Thank you, seventh grade vocabulary book!)

The only fun part is the abundance of caulk jokes to be made.

Will you hold my caulk for a minute?

Who’s caulk is this?

Get that caulk out of there!

Please don’t touch my caulk.

Let’s talk about the previous owners of this house. I know that everyone probably complains about them (not MY previous owners, of course. Get your own previous owners to complain about! Mine are solid gold, and I’m not sharing.) when they move into a new house, but holy crap, these people were clueless. The bathtub is a shining example. Their method and reasoning appears to have been something along the lines of, “Oh hey, the caulk in the bathtub is all mildewy and gross. I guess I should just smear some more over it, right?” There are some spots where there are not only about 5 or 6 different layers of disgusting caulk (hhehehe, sorry that one got to me), but they used DIFFERENT KINDS OF CAULK. If you do a simple google search about how to properly and EFFECTIVELY caulk a bathtub, everyone is very vehement about not mixing caulks (hahha- okay, okay. That’s the last immature outburst of giggling, I promise).

Actually, pretty much every project the previous owners undertook on this house could have benefited from this thing I like to call: THE INTERNET. You found your meth recipe on the internet, surely you can find how to properly caulk a tub. (Not that I’m suggesting the previous owners were meth heads. Though it would explain a lot.)

More examples of things the internet could have prevented:

There are holes all over the walls because they apparently didn’t understand the concept of finding a stud to mount on (HAHAHHAA, I couldn’t resist that one, and that was a guffaw, not a giggle).

They laid ceramic tile and made pretty much every mistake in the book, which results in the grout failing, the tile coming loose, and eventually breaking. What we thought was a “replace a few tiles” project turned into completely tearing up the tile and parts of the subfloor so we could start from scratch. I found a piggy bank’s worth of pennies under the loose tiles, leading me to believe that they were trying to balance the loose and uneven tiles with them. I would have respected them more if they’d just GLUED THE DAMN TILES BACK DOWN. Good god. Watch an episode of MacGyver, you ingrates!

Back to the toilet: the reason we had to replace subfloor in the bathroom was because the toilet leaked. Lots of houses probably have toilets in a place where it would be hard to tell if the toilet had a slow leak, so I’d be tempted to give them a pass. But no. The laundry room is directly under the bathroom and there is a very clear view of the subfloor and plumbing for the bathroom, so it would have been clear to anyone that took a glance at the ceiling that there was a problem. And really, it would have cost $5 and maybe an hour to fix the problem.  I mean, the first thing I do when I walk in the laundry room now that we’ve fixed the floor and installed the toilet is check for any evidence of water damage.

I’ll stop there, but there’s plenty more, so you can see why I’m at the end of my rope with these people. People I have never met (and never will meet). I spent 45 minutes prying old caulk (not laughing) out of the tub this morning and I suspect I have at least another 3 hours of caulk removal (!) ahead of me. I curse their faceless hearts!

Perhaps the most annoying part is that the entire tub enclosure really needs to be replaced, so in a few months all this will just get ripped right out anyway. But I will try not to think about that as I’m scraping caulk (!!) and swearing at these buffoons this afternoon (oh, a rhyme!).

In between curse words and caulk mutilation (ew, that one goes a little too far), I will be making new undies for the SmarmyClothes shop. Call them pantaloons, underoos, knickers, or undapants if you must, but under no circumstances are they ‘panties’. What a ridiculous word, panties. The only acceptable use of that word is panty-waist. And maybe panty-raid. And yet my shop category is named panties. FOR SHAME!

Off to dabble in caulk and panties.