Let The Texturing Begin!

It was another busy week as Lawrence went over to the house every day after work. In fact, there hasn't been a day since we purchased the house in February that Lawrence hasn't been doing something at the house.

He finished coating and smoothing the walls and ceilings getting ready for texture. But before we started texturing, Lawrence wanted to build a stand to hold the texture gun upright. It's a weird shaped device that can only lay on it's side, that is until Lawrence built the stand. The stand makes it easy to fill the texture gun with the compound, which has to be mixed with water to the consistency of pancake batter so it will flow through the gun. There are different settings for different types of texture. We want what's called "orange peel", so Lawrence set up some cardboard in the garage to test the gun for the right spray pattern.

My project this weekend was to cover windows, outlets, switches and doors with either plastic or paper and tape it all up to prevent both texture and paint from getting on any of these objects. I got three of the rooms done, and it's a lot harder than I thought it would be.

Once we were ready, we moved the compressor to the hallway, plugged in the air line to the gun, filled the gun with texture, turned on some lights so we could see what we were doing, and off we went:

Being our first time to do any of this, there were a couple of small problems with thickness of the texture, too much in one spot, not enough in another, etc. About 5 minutes after spraying, I went through with a large flat metal scraper and "knocked down" the sprayed material. By the time we got to the second room we had it pretty well down, and overall it looks good! We may go through and do a second coat, but we'll wait until it all dries to see what else needs to be done.

Spraying the walls is easy, but the ceilings are very difficult since the sprayer doesn't like pointing very far up as it loses pressure.

The nasty carpet that is in the house was bad before, but now it's got lots of stuff in it from texture material, ceiling scrapings, and no telling what else. As planned, it will be the last thing changed before we move in. We have more rooms to texture, then all the painting, so it's going to get a lot worse.

We also went to Home Depot, as we seem to do every day, and looked at various types of molding. We're trying to decide what we will use on the ceiling, the floor, and possibly chair railings. We also need to start thinking about tile for various rooms. While we were there, we picked up some more plants to fill-in the backyard. Lawrence has been busy planting and digging. It's coming together, but just like the inside of the house, there's a lot more to do. We also picked up a new and larger birdbath.

A couple of loads of laundry and some cleaning up finishes the weekend. It's nice to see progress, even as slow as it is. Lawrence will continue to go to the house every day after work, and I'll be there next weekend.