Is My Caulk Big Enough?

I am a captive of my own mind. Lately, I can not escape from this self-made, bastardized parody of a Dead Kennedy song, Pull My Strings.

Is my caulk big enough,
Is my brain small enough
For you to make me a star?

Give me a toot
I'll sell you my soul
Pull my strings and I'll go far

The worst part is that isn't even particularly fun nor does it make much sense, even to me.

Like every other frustrated home improvement monkey, I've been playing with my caulk for two or three hours every day. Don't worry, in the interest of health and safety, I always try to keep latex between me and my caulk though the occasional breakage is evitable. It’s a good thing rubber gloves come 10 to a pack.

Actually, I only squeezed in 45 minutes of caulking last night. Why? Because I finished caulking all the cracks in the laundry room ceiling.

Of course you may wonder why there are cracks in the ceiling since the laundry room is in one of the two new additions to the Devil Queen. The short answer is we used salvaged (or is it cooler to say "reclaimed"?) beadboard. Beadboard, like a good kiss, ought to have a little tongue. Unfortunately, salvaged beadboard has an propensity for loosing its tongue during removal. We got pretty good at saving it, but a large majority of it has damaged or entirely missing tongue. And, the laundry room ceiling got the dregs of our beadboard selection.

The cracks weren't too noticeable until we had insulation blown into the attic. While it did a great job of keeping the Queen warm, it also gave us row upon row of hairy crack. That was unacceptable.


[This wasn't the worst crack, but I'd already filled the rest in at this point]

I started the priming/caulking job several months ago before I was put on a strict one-room-at-a-time diet. As it was, it was good to be moved to the hall bathroom because I was stuck trying to figure out a way to prime/caulk/paint the ceiling and walls above the hot tub. I didn't want to stand a ladder in the tub and stacking a platform on the rim of the tub wasn't an option either. The tub is fiberglass and most of the weight is supported by the tub's bottom which rests on the sub-floor. The rim which rests upon the tile surround isn't meant to hold any great amount of weight (me plus platform and step ladder). All I needed to do was break our $1400 tub before I ever used it, right?

Well, my wife had a solution to the problem for me.



She saw the dry wall guy do this. Basically, butt the feet of the extension ladder up against the wall, extend it up to the ceiling at nearly a 45 degree angle, and rest it upon the opposite wall. I was reluctant to try it at first (heavy guy + ladder leaning at weird angle against dry wall = hole in wall?), but what the hell. And, it worked.

So, tonight I will give the ceiling it's second and final primer coat. If I have time, I'll finish priming the walls too. Or, I will work on them at any rate. Who knows, maybe we'll have some actual paint up by the end of the week?