What to do with Walls

As you go into distressed or abused homes (either by malicious behavior or neglect, or even just age), a common scene is beat up surfaces. The easiest solution is to empty the house completely and deal with the walls and ceiling. I usually opt for texturing the walls. This hides tiny holes and imperfections in the wall such as scuffs and dings. It won't hide larger holes, nor will it flatten out a bow in a wall. But, it'll cover things nicely presenting a clean and neat appearance. That's what we're after. I usually get a texture process done on the walls called "knockdown" (strange name for a process that does on WALLS!). Knockdown is usually a heavy spray that is applied, the just before drying, it's knocked down, or flattened with a trough or scrapper. The advantage is that knockdown hides imperfections on the wall of these older homes. As a process, it's relatively quick and easy to apply to an empty house. You can also not knockdown the spray and you're left with what some call "orange peel." Either one looks great and satisfy our goal. It dries hard and is a texture that lasts. Now, you'd think you would not have to tell your workers to take out picture hangers before spraying. And, you'd think you would not have to tell them to take out curtain hangers and switch plates...but NO! You do! I've had my painter come back out a time or two to remove all the thing he didn't and re-texture those areas. Now I STRESS doing this before they start. I've seen spray so heavy on top of switch plates that they had to be cut around with a utility knife before removing else they would tear a big sheet of texture, sheet rock with them, forcing a lot of patch work. When you remove curtain hangers, switch plates and nails AFTER spraying, it tends to pull up more texture and you're left with a mess! Pull everything off the walls FIRST! Put scotch tape over the switches so spray doesn't get down in the outlets.