Welcome to DIY for homeowners. We're Mother Daughter Projects. I'm Steph. I'm
Vicki and today we are back at Steph's house and we're improving the look of
her shower by tackling those hard water spots, removing old caulk and putting in some
fresh caulk. I will let you know that when I moved into my house the shower
stall was not looking great. I probably needed to replace it then but I didn't have
the budget to do it and now I'm kind of like well I'm gonna move out of my
house one day do I really want to put in that time and money into it. So that's
why we're just taking some improvement steps but the shower stall probably
could just go ahead and be replaced. So again, all the tools that we're using,
materials and tools be linked in the description below. So let's get started.
The first step was to remove all the old caulk. We used a variety of tools to
achieve this goal. First you'll see this plastic razor blade which is one of our
favorite new finds. This is much better than metal, as it won't scratch my
aluminum frame. Another tool we use is called a black stick. It's great for
getting the small crevices.
We also use a traditional caulk removal tool
but we are very careful with this as it could easily scratch the aluminum.
We had some stubborn areas with calcium deposits on the top of the caulk.
Some areas also had some clear silicone which again we're using the black stick
to remove.
Before we re-caulked I found this product called Quick-Glo which I read works for
glass and aluminum to remove hard water spots. All you do is put a little on a
microfiber cloth and work it in until the product completely disappears. I also
used it on the aluminum frame.
It was hard to get good footage of it working so we headed to mom's house. You
can see water spots on her chrome shower frame and glass. As she worked it in
those water spots disappeared. You can really see the spots here and now she
works it, it really becomes clearer and clearer. And this really shows
before-and-after. Wow you can see her so much better! Once I cleaned up my shower
a bit, I moved on to re-caulking. I'm using white silicone caulk and a Ryobi
battery-powered caulk gun. I chose the silicone because it says 20-years mold
and mildew resistant and I don't want to do this again while live in this house! I
cut the tip off the caulk tube, poked a hole to break the seal, and set it up in
the caulk gun. You can definitely use a manual caulk gun but we've not had good
luck with that. We found this Ryobi battery power version is a must-have
tool for us. On the side you can adjust the speed as you see me doing here
already. Here I am starting inside the shower. You
can see I get a nice even flow with this caulk gun.
Yep, I made a little fumble here-- I should have started on the other side as the
caulk gun hit the wall. No worries. I cleaned up the glob and put some soapy
water at my finger and smoothed out the caulk. I did a couple of passes and I went
a little higher on this side as the aluminum has been damaged and I wanted
to try to cover that up as best I could.
I continued that process inside the shower. I have the footage for it but I'm
not going to bore you with all that. Another tip, we use canned air to blow
away the caulk debris before we moved on. On the outside of the shower, we decided
to add painters tape to get a cleaner line and we continued the same process.
When using painters tape you can get a little bit more messy because anything
that gets on the tape will go away once you remove the tape.
We get a nice smooth line. Now for some 'before' and 'afters.' The corner of my
shower before and here's the other corner. Much cleaner. It's not perfect but
it's much improved.
This is the outside of my shower before.
And I wanted to cover up that rusty part in the middle and we did that with some
clear silicone caulk. The inside of my shower. You can really see the damage to
the aluminum and the after. Much-improved. I was able to cover up that damaged spot.
What we learned. You probably saw in the video where the aluminum frame around
the glass was really discolored and it was pitted in many places and in the
course of research, we found out that, probably somewhere along the
line, someone you use a harsh product on that aluminum. Something like CLR, Lime
Away or even vinegar. All of that can eat away at the soft aluminum and
once it eats away, that's permanent. As I was using the caulk gun, I realized it was
easier to actually just kind of go through the motion before I actually lay
the bead of caulk down because sometimes the gun would get in the way if I
started from one angle or the other. So practice the movements before you
actually do it because that will save you some globs of caulk as you saw that
happen. I am no pro at that at all. One of the things we did learn was the more
light the better. You need to see what you're doing and we ended up using his
light by Milwaukee and there will be more details in our written post. In the video
you saw me use a product called Quick-Glo, and I found that just after I was
doing research about how to clean my shower. And it's not a product that's
actually made for doing the shower but it works perfect for the glass and for
the aluminum because that was the thing I was concerned about was I didn't want
to get any more damage to the aluminum. It's actually made in the United States.
It's a family company. It's an eco-friendly product. It was really
interesting as I was reading about it so I'll put a link below to their website
so you can check out some more information about that. If you have any
great tips for cleaning in a bathroom please leave those in the comments below
so we can all share. Bye
If you're like me and you don't like to clean but you know you need to clean,
then you're probably gonna want to check out this video about how to clean your
showerhead. And if you want to see where Steph's shower started, check out this wet
& Forget shower cleaning video and if you want mom to come to your house to do
some cleaning let us know in the comments below....
(Please note "mom" is shaking her head NO!)