Not sure whether you need to spend the money caulking your home or not? We have the answers for you!
Bathroom Caulking:
When it comes to your bathrooms, this is absolutely the most important place to apply silicone in your home. Not Only does it give your bathroom the seamless finish it deserves, it is the final waterproofing seal on your most easily damaged and costly to repair room in your house. This is not a place where you want to question spending the money, and you need to make sure it is completed by a skilled professional.
When done correctly you should have clean and consistent lines in the corners of your bathroom & every meeting joint for example, Tiles to vanity & vanity to basin etc. Your grout joints should be free from overhanging silicone. It is always best to match the tile colour when possible, If this can be done then you should match the grout joints as close as possible.
It is equally important that this job is completed in a quality, Long lasting & Mould resistant silicone. When corners are cut you could find yourself having to pay a tradie to rip this out and re caulk because of 3 main reasons:
- Cheap silicone has been used, that is not mould resistant and will not handle the mould that heat & water in your shower/bath can create.
- Silicone has not been applied to the correct mm thickness,this thickness needed can vary between silicones but to cure and bond correctly it generally needs to be applied between 4-6mm.
- The silicone has not sealed 100% of the joints, which will defeat the purpose of caulking your bathroom in the first place.
Always use a caulking specialist when it comes to bathroom caulking to ensure that it is completed to the correct standards & requirements.
Skirt To Floorboard & Stair To Plaster Caulking:
Caulking your skirts to floorboards is not something that comes close to the importance of caulking your bathrooms, But nonetheless, It still has some great benefits to your home. When left unsealed you will not get that completely finished look to your home. With inconsistent gaps that vary across your skirting or stair perimeter. As you can see below, A nice clean bead of silicone gives your stairs the finished look that cant be replicated by painters using no more gaps.
Common Mistakes!
Time & time again we see builders and clients opt to have their painters no more gaps these joints at plaster stage and then paint to the stair as a finish.
Here are some negatives you might not know when choosing this route
- No more gaps can not handle movement!Regardless of what your painter tells you, if there is any movement no more gaps will not move with it, It will Crack! & you will be back to square one, and either have to call back your painter or have the joints caulked with a silicone.
- The paint to stair joint finish will not be straight!The same straight finish you can get from silicone you can not get this same consistent finish with paint. To get close your painter will have to take a serious amount of time to tape and straight every joint, which they will either charge your for, or make up for rushing in another part of your home to get that time back.
Something we do when caulking skirts to floorboards only, is we match the silicone colour to the floor. What this does it create a seamless finish where you can’t almost even tell that the joints have been caulked. When these joints are caulked it white, they look great at first, but over time this is where dust will most likely gather, and it will stand out above the white silicone & look dirty. This does not happen when the silicone is matched to the floor colour.
It is a not so secret, secret of professional caulkers!
With the huge range of silicone colour available nowadays it is likely your chosen caulking professional can match your floorboards, only when it cant be matched to the floor do we use white. Only as last resort!
Caulking Your Externals Windows:
Another very common question when building your home is whether you need to have your windows sealed externally. If you want to improve the integrity of your home! The answer is yes! Below is a list of benefits of caulking your eternal windows:
- You will add another layer of insulation to your home! You would like to think that your windows to your chosen external wall, brick, timber clad, render etc is finished exactly to your window. However, this is not always the case. We regularly see gaps ranging from 5-20mm. Think of it like this, without a silicone bead filling up this gap, the only layer between a standard home would be some insulation & the plaster on the inside. If this was my home I would want this sealed and insulated & waterproofed correctly!
- Again with many joints it will look unfinished not sealed! As with your skirts to floorboards, if this is left unsealed you will leave your house looking obviously unfinished.
- Briefly mentioned in point one, your windows will not be waterproofed! Most importantly you are leaving your home at an easy attack from bad weather. You don’t want rain getting into your walls and potentially damaging the integrity of your home.
For these reasons we always highly recommend that rate, you have your windows sealed by a professional. Even with a 1mm gap, even at a much slower rate, you leave your walls open to potential damage.
Jump over to our website https://www.correctcaulking.com.au/Caulking-Melbourne/for all your professional caulking needs and tips. We are now also regularly updating our blog to help builders and home owners with all their professional caulking questions.
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