Neverending caulking...

My bathroom and I have a love/hate relationship with one another. I love that it's been redone, but I hate how it still demands that I fix things that should, in my opinion, not need fixing. The battle over the bathtub caulk has been annoying me for a good long while now, and I'm starting to think this is a battle I am never going to win.

I have caulked my bathtub more times than I can count. Granted, several of those times occurred before we had our bathroom redone. The hideously ugly pink tiles (circa 1950) that graced the walls hid an abundance of mildew that continuously grew up and out through the caulk. Every time this happened, I would scrape it all out, bleach like crazy, then re-caulk. After a while, my husband convinced me the problem was further in the walls than I could bleach, so I gave up the fight. Shortly thereafter, we had the bathroom redone. I'm going to count that as a win against the mildew, even if I had nothing to do with it.

I loved our new bathroom. It looked fantastic. I was scrubbing it down far more often than necessary simply because I wanted to keep that "shiny new bathroom" feel to it. Then I started noticing the telltale mildew signs in the caulk once more. Further investigation revealed that two layers of caulk had been installed by our contractor, and the two layers did not fully overlap. There were several bubbled gaps where you could still see caulk, but you were really seeing the bottom layer. The top layer was not covering the lower level. Water got between the layers and spawned mildew. I was not amused.

After several attempts at bleaching out the little bubbles of mildew, I realized that it was fully into the caulk and it was never going to get better. I chose to scrape out the caulk and redo it so that it would not go into the walls like we had in the old bathroom setup. What I neglected to do, apparently, was put bleach into the wall underneath where the caulk was, so it came back. (Note to self: Vinegar does not kill mildew the same way that bleach does. So much for that attempt at disinfecting the area behind the caulk.)

So here I am again, trying to redo the caulk in the bathroom. I redid it last weekend, waited the twenty-four hours listed on the container before exposing it to moisture, and discovered it still had not cured. Okay, fine. So I waited three days after my next attempt, just to be sure. It seemed fine for a couple of days, then started melting away again last night. I spent this morning scraping out the still-wet caulk, cleaning the area, letting it dry out, and re-caulking only to have my son's shower wet it once more. (I did put up plastic to prevent it from getting wet, but he was encouraging the plastic to billow upwards at him, so the water splashed up from underneath.

Caulking is rapidly turning into a daily occurrence around here. I'm ready to throw in the figurative towel. It's unbelievable that I'm losing a battle with an inanimate object whose sole role in life is to get dry.