Wall Texture

My favorite type of wall texture is heavy knock-down. I learned how to do it myself from a friend in Tumwater, Damon Stevens. After Damon taught me how to do it I bought my own spray rig and have textured many rooms. At the time this was the best DIY spray rig on the market and it works great. It has three sizes of tips for different textures, rather than the old style with a rotating disc with different size holes. I have also blended orange peel textures and acoustic ceiling texture with it with good results.

I use thinned joint compound and dial the pressure back to about 40 psi. I noticed early on that if I did not do a good job feathering out the joints that they would show in certain light. I naturally concluded that I needed to start with a smooth wall in order to achieve good results. After skim coating the walls of three rooms in this house I decided to try it without skim coating. The walls in this house have some kind of roller applied texture that is not very attractive and un-duplicatable as far as I am concerned. Skim coating is a LOT of work, messy and requires a lot of sanding. See my previous posts.

For the master bedroom and the office I sprayed the texture over the existing texture with no prep to speak of. I did take a 6" knife and hit some of the really high spots to knock them down a bit. the results were amazingly good. To me they don't look any different than the rooms I spent days skim coating.  Needless to say, I won't be doing any more skim coating.

This is an unpainted wall.

After painting. You can't tell that the knock down was sprayed over another texture.