We install a great deal of prefinished cabinets in our kitchen projects. I have always hated the necessary evil of using the hard putty sticks provided by the manufacturers to fill the nail holes. One recent job featured a three-piece built-up crown that promised to eat lots of time filling all the nail holes with the stiff, lumpy sticks.
Then my foreman, Joseph Holton, got an idea watching our tilesetter. He uses colored caulks to grout the tile at the intersections of dissimilar materials. Tile stores are loaded with colored caulks these days. Why not see if we could find a match for our whitewashed maple cabinets? Sure enough, Joseph found one that matched perfectly. The caulk flowed easily into the nail holes and wiped off with a damp cloth.
Jim Brovelli, Berkeley, CA
