Sealing your sink

Naturally I pretend like I don't know one end of a box spanner from the other end of an adjustable spanner, cuz while I love leather, it is not very MILFy to be wearing a toolbelt.  But there are times when sisters have to do it for themselves (wink), especially if they live with a Baron who just says, "Yes, I will get round to it soon."  

The French are even more paranoid
than the British about Poles
taking their jobs, so the Polish
Tourist Board made this poster, saying
"I'm staying here!  Come on over." 

For a while I was hopeful of getting a really good plumber like this one, as there were lots of things in the press about immigration and how Polish men were coming and taking up all the plumbing jobs.  In the end I had to make do with my British plumber after all.  He is very excellent (ex military, so he is punctual AND tidy) but there are some things I feel it isn't worth paying £40 or £50 for. Stripping out the mildewed sealant round the bath to replace it with clean new sealant is one of them.  

Adjustable spanner,
pic from Wikipedia

Box spanner, 99 p.
from Je James cycles

Sealant gun from Screwfix.
Mmm, what an interesting name .
I wonder ... oh, sorry, LOL. ..

The first task when sealing your bath is to choose the right colour - of sealant, dahlink! not your outfit.  You can have clear - which will show all the defects of the scrotty gap between tiles and bath through it.  You can have cream - which is good for not showing that you didn't do the job to quite the standard of an NVQ trained plumber, and there is black.  Black is for black tiles but when I went to the hardware shop, it was £1 cheaper than cream, and I figure it will not show the mildew, which is also black.  And after all black is the new black, dahlinks.  

You should also have a 'gun', a kind of metal frame with a jerk-y handle (mmm, excuse me a minute) which you put the sealant tube in and pull the handle and it squeezes the sealant out for you. Slowly. Er, I was saying ... I have one of these already cuz I have done this sealant thing before.  

First job is to clean out the old sealant. If you pick an end off and pull, most of it will peel away in a very satisfying way. Then you can scrape out the bits left. The hardware shop suggested I buy a Stanley knife for this purpose. They only had a Harris blade, not a Stanley one; it was more expensive and had a handy little pocket on the side for keeping spare blades in so I felt it was a good tool for a top class MILF and bought it. I of course do not use it for scraping along the bathtub with, it's much too pretty. I just use an old dinner knife for that. You can put the knife in the dishwasher afterwards and put it on the table and nobody will notice (except you will know it's a little bit bent and that the black fleck on it might come off on someone's vegetables). 

OK, so you've cleaned out all the yucky bits of old sealant and made sure the side of the bath is dry (just dab some toilet tissue along it, sweetie, that will be fine).  Now you grasp your sealant in its gun and rest it on the edge of the bath and tile, squeezing up the handle of the gun, you just move it slowly along, squidging the sealant out in a nice toothpaste-y line. If you can ice a cake, sealing a bath is a doddle, sweetie. 

Next you should run something along the sealant to smooth it into the crack. You can use some special implement but the actual plumber will just use a wetted finger.  I use my middle finger cuz it's the one I use for ... it's just the one I use,yah, it's broader and more flexible.  Um, la la la, just smooth along the sealant and it doesn't matter what finger you like to use. For sealant. You can try to tidy up messy bits afterwards with the corner of wet tissue paper but sealant is like nail varnish. If it's a real mess, it's best to start all over again. Trying to fix it will smudge it up and make it blodgy. Just run your wetted finger back over any bits you blodged up trying to make it look better and it will be fine. 

Here is my sink, with sealant applied and it looks fine. Hmmm? You want a close-up view! Oh, of the sink. OK yah, it does look wobbly but that's artistic, dahlink, and I saved enough money on it to buy Piglet's school shoes. And most of all - it doesn't leak or look disgustingly mildewy any more.  

I was a bit puzzled to find that unlike my eyeliner, there is no top to my sealant, other than the long black one with a hole in the end for squidging it out along the edge of the bath. My friend Di tells me that they do sell tops but that it's best to use a bit of duct tape and you can also stick a nail in the nozzle as a temporary and cheap cap. 

Job done, gurrls!