Fingers in the Pie
posted in General |When I was a kid, my fingers were my favorite tool for washing the dishes. Sometimes if I was using a sponge or a dishcloth with the hot soapy water, I’d miss some stuck on bit of food. But my fingers could always find a rough spot that was in the wrong place. So even when we had gloves and cloths, I’d tend to just use my fingers. I was closer to cleanliness than I could get with the materials.
This weekend, I was assigned to rip out all of the old grody caulk from the shower and replace it. It’s been done a few times; first, we ripped out the ugly walls and replaced it, then later we patched it with some rubbery clear caulk. I did an abysmal job of it– the caulk was rough and somehow a bunch of mildew and mold had snuck behind it, which we could see through the clear caulk. So to redo it, I bought the caulk and a little thingamajig that I was supposed to trowel through the freshly laid caulk and smudge it into position. It was a miserable experience. I couldn’t get the little thingy pointed right, all of the caulk that it scraped up just stuck to the little tool, and it was gloopy and messy. So I used my fingers.
I’ve used my fingers for a lot of this sort of thing. I get impatient with the putty knife smearing the wall compound on the wall, and it’s silly anyway because we have these horrid old lathe-and-plaster walls that are so rough that using the putty knife just winds totally weird looking. So I wind up using my fingers, getting it mostly patched and then trying to get it sort of textured like the rest of the wall.
This time, I ran my finger down all the crevasses and slid it into the holes that had to be fixed. And then I wiped up some of the excess with, I hate to admit it, some baby wipes (what? they were wet, disposable and handy to my gloopy fingers!), thus completing one of the best caulking jobs I’ve done.
