7 Places in Your Home That Need a $6 Tube of Caulk Right Now

The bead around your bathtub cracks and turns gray, so you call. $265, and the truck is gone by ten. That winter a draft starts working the living room window, so you call. $228 to seal the gaps, plus the coffee you made while you both waited for it to warm up. In spring you find a soft line of swollen wood at the back door, so you call. $189, and the fellow is honest enough to tell you it would've been $20 if you'd caught it in the fall. Then the mice show up in the pantry wall, and the pest company's estimate opens at $150 just for the visit. Add it up. That's $832 in about eighteen months, four trucks in your driveway, and every single invoice was the same repair wearing a different name. A gap that needed sealing. Here's the part nobody on any of those trucks is going to volunteer. The tool for all four jobs sits on a shelf at the hardware store you drive past every day. It costs about six dollars. It fits in a ten-dollar gun. And the skill takes one Saturday to learn, mostly with your thumb. There are seven places on your property where that tube earns its keep, and one of them, the one you walk over every day, is worth more than the other six combined. I'm Hank. Twenty-eight years inspecting and renovating homes around Chicago, more than 10,000 of them, no sponsors, no brand deals. So here's the list, all seven, counted. The tub line. The sink seam. The window edge. The door frame. The holes where the house breathes wrong. The siding joints. And number seven, the expensive one, stays sealed until the end: a strip of concrete you cross every single day without once looking down. Six I'll name as we go; the last one earns its reveal.