THE-DIY-SITE.COM

When doing projects around the house, we’re often faced with a choice of sealant to use.  Everyone should be familiar with caulk, grout and silicone.  Typically, caulk and silicone can be found in the long skinny tubes with sharp tips that fit inside of a caulking gun.  Grout usually comes in “tub”.

Silicone is very popular because it is extremely resiliant to water.  Silicone is most commonly used around windows  and doors.  Silicone is one of the more abundant elements on Earth.  It is second most abundant, only to oxygen.  Silicone is used in a variety of ways, specifically in construction.  Even Silly Putty has silicone as one of its main components.  Silicone forms a bond with almost any surface or material.  This includes concrete, glass, steel, granite and plastic, to name a few.  Because of this, silicone is a highly desireable product in construction.

Caulk is typically used as a sealant around kitchen and bathroom projects.  Caulk is flexible and can allow for structural movement.  Rather you like it or not, all of our houses shift on their foundations.  Most are so insignificant that you are not likely to notice it.  However, if grout was used around these transitional jointed areas, grout would crack.  This would be a sure tale-tell sign that your foundation is doing some shifting.  Recently, I put down some laminate floors throughout the majority of the house.  Where the tile floors from the kitchen meets the laminate, there is a transition piece (t-moulding).  Because of some shifting that had already taken place, the transition from the tile to laminate was not level.  Under the transition piece on the side where the tile is, I put a “wall” of caulk.  At a glance, the color (grey) matches the tile grout.  But, I used caulk because it was flexible and when stepped on, it would give way, but would not crack.

Grout is most commonly used for ceramic tiling or around masonry type projects.  Grout is typically composed of water, cement and sand.  Most of the time, you can buy the grout with a color tint for decorative purposes.  This is especially common in tiling grout or flooring grout.

Hopefully this will help you make a decision about which sealant/bonding angent to use next time you have a project.  I will attempt to write more on this to illustrate more specific uses.  For now, I just wanted to share some of the common components of each.