Add texturing to my resume.

Our labor day weekend, we worked.  Earlier in the week, I'd finished a third coat of joint compound on each of the seams in Big Sister's new room, and Saturday we tried our hand at texturing.

The only experience I've had with finishing drywall previous to this room, was doing a "fire tape" in the garage of the last house we built.  Doing this room was the very definition of "winging it"!
The walls have three coats of joint compound to mask the seams between drywall pieces, each made with a larger swath of compound, and the third with a much larger size joint knife.

You can see the difference here in this picture, where I hadn't done the closet yet.

Once the walls were done, I though it would be easier to finish the ceiling texture first.  I'd watched the professionals texture our upstairs, and thought I could imitate their style.  They called the texture on our ceilings "stomp".  They pressed a big glob of joint compound and then smoothed it with a joint knife.

Since we're trying to do this on a fraction of the budget we had upstairs, I made my own pressing tool.  It's about 3 cups of all purpose flour, wrapped in two plastic grocery bags and reinforced with duct tape.  MacGuyver has nothing on me.  :)

I even made a little duct tape handle.

To apply, Big Sis would put a slap of compound on my "tool", and I would press it into the ceiling.

Then, I'd knock down the peaks with my knife.

I'd do some additional smoothing, and then repeat for the next section.

This was a very messy job.

Here's how the ceilings turned out:

Next came texturing the walls.  Here, we tried to imitate the "cloud" texture that the professionals used on our walls upstairs.  This meant making roundish shapes on the wall with the joint knife, and feathering out the edges.  Here is a photo from upstairs, so you can get an idea of what we were hoping to achieve.

I tried to channel my inner "Bob Ross" as I did this.  It does feel a little bit like painting with oils, although the smell is all wrong.

As we finished this up, we were interrupted by a tornado warning! 

It was exciting and a bit scary to say the least.  Thankfully, we were just deluged with rain and hail, and although two twisters may have touched down in our area, no serious damage was done.

Next time I'll show you how things turned out after we sanded yesterday.  That was REALLY dusty.