Home Improvement Lunacy!

Well, this morning, I undertook phase two of the great bathroom project. Phase one was a very, very thorough cleaning of the bathroom and the tub. I scrubbed the baseboards, scrubbed the gunk and buildup off of the tub floor, and cleaned out the bathtub jets. (Although as you can see from the pictures below, I clearly didn't clean the shower wall tiles. Oops. I guess maybe that'll be phase three.)

When I was cleaning the tub during phase one, I couldn't seem to get all of the mildew off of of the caulking around the edge of the tub. The reason: it was under/in the caulk. So phase two was re-caulking the tub. Now this was my first major home improvement project, so I was a little scared when I first undertook this task. But a little excited too.

The first step was removing the old caulk and cleaning out the seam. I didn't take pictures. You should be glad. There was actual slime. Lots of mildew and lots of slime. Ewwwww.
Step one: scraping off all the old caulk with a razor blade and a screwdriver.
Step two: scraping out as much of the slime and mildew as I could with a screwdriver, razor blade, and paper towels, and Q-tips.
Step three: dredging the seam with bleach-water.
Step four: letting it dry.
Step five: getting impatient and blow-drying the seam. (At this point I remembered the creepy "Don't learn electrical safety by accident" ads that KC Power & Light used to run. Then I shut the toilet lid in case I fell backwards and dropped the hair dryer into the toilet.)
Step six: letting it dry more.

Here's what it looked like during the drying process.












Imagine how gross this seam looked when it was filled with mildew and slime.













Before I knew it (okay, so it was hours later) it was time to fill up the tub and apply the new caulk. It's a little lumpy and there's probably more caulk than is absolutely necessary, but I did it! And it doesn't look too bad! Go me!









Hopefully I let the seam dry out long enough. And hopefully this will last a while without getting all grody and mildewy and slimy. Here's the finished product!