Friday, April 19, 2013

Me: 1; Orange Peel: 0

I have battled the orange peel texture on my bathroom walls, and I have won.  I WIN I WIN I WIN!  It wasn't as hard as I thought, either.  I'll show you some photos of the process.  We started here:

  

Do you see it?  Look at the texture of the walls over the vanity.  It's pretty aggressive.  I thought I could live with it, but the more I lived with it, the more I hated it-- it made wall repairs difficult and muddied up the wall color.  Plus it looked dated.  Like, majorly dated.

I did some research and I thought I'd wind up skim-coating via the squeegee method, in which you roll slightly thinned drywall mud onto the walls with a 3/4 nap roller and then smooth it with a squeegee (hence the name).  But I kept thinking about a conversation I'd had with my mom when I first moved in.  She'd wondered if maybe I could just apply mud to the walls and then scrape it with a taping knife, thereby filling in the gaps in the orange peel without having to really resurface the walls.  And I started thinking, why not?  I decided to try a little patch just to see how it worked.  

And it worked great.

Here's a close-up of the original texture:


Oof, that shit is UGLY.  This is what we were working with after one coat of mud:


And after the second coat:




And a wide shot of the second coat:




I sanded between the first and second coats.  It was awful.  But when I finished, I primed and applied two coats of very pale blue-gray paint, and I'm so happy with the results:




And your close-up:


Nothin' but roller texture.  

SUCCESS!

Side-by-sides for ya:


August 2012 to April 2013:



















Boo-yah.

And also, the antique nightstand that got bounced from my bedroom in favor of a RAST has found a new home in my hallway.  How darling is this?



I'm going to hang King Charles above it.

This weekend I tackle the RASTs-- updates to come!

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