Fix Caulk Around a Sink

Five years ago when I first moved into the house, one of the projects I worked on was to re-caulk the sink.  It's a white porcelain sink with a melamine counter top. The caulk around the edge was all discolored and cracked.  So I scraped out and re-caulked everything and it looked great... well for about a month anyway.

I realized I had used the wrong caulk because it started to crack immediately. It wasn't real bad and didn't get much worse over the past five years, but it was only noticeable. So the other week I decided to fix it and this time I was going to use the right silicone caulk that I should've used the first time.  Here's what the sink looked like before I started.

And here is what that bad cracked caulk looked like.  From up close it looks pretty terrible but from far away you couldn't really tell, it wasn't that noticeable. 

The first thing I did was get out the utility knife and try to scrape the old cracked caulk away. It worked pretty well for getting the bulk of the material. 

However I did have to use this other razor blade knife to scrape with the flat edge along the counter top.  This worked really well and getting all the rest of the caulk which was stuck to the counter top.

For the small area in the back I had used the small razor blade. I couldn't get in there with any other tool although it wasn't super critical since no one would ever see it back there.

Here's what it looked like when I was done scraping caulk off just a one half of the sink.  There were lots of brown and yellow pieces that I had removed.

The reason I decided to do this now, was because we just finished remodeling our family room.  And when we installed the crown molding we had to use the right caulk in order to fill the cracks.  For that job we used crown molding white caulk which had only a small amount of silicone.  But for this job around the kitchen sink the best thing to use is 100% silicone. That way when the sink and counter top expand and contract separately the silicone will be able to stretch and move instead of crack.  Here's the caulk we used for the sink.

This is what it looked like when I just started adding the caulk around the edge. It didn't look very pretty because I was trying to do it one-handed with the camera in the other hand. But the good thing is that it doesn't have to look pretty you just have to get the material out there at first.  Although the better job you do spreading the caulk, the easier it is to smooth it out.

Then the hard part comes in when you have to go back and smooth it all out using your finger. This is the part that takes all the time, where you are sliding down the sink trying not to take too much material away by rounding over the edge.

You can see that there was a lot of cleanup and I did end up using way more silicone that I needed to. I definitely could've gotten away with putting a smaller bead around the edge of the sink.

Here's what some of the finished product looked like, a smooth edge in transition between the sink and counter top.

And here's the finished product. You can't really tell from this distance though but it looks a lot better. And it's been over a three months now since I installed the new silicone caulk and there aren't any cracks yet. 

I'm confident that it will stay that way because this caulk is still rubbery and flexible to the touch where is the old stuff hardened up the next day.