Adding Drama to a Room with a Texture Sprayer
Are you remodeling or redecorating? Thinking about changing the feel of a room in your house? Do you want to have an unusual finish to your walls that makes a bold statement in your house? Try adding texture to your walls and you’ll have a statement feature in a few hours flat. All you need is a texture sprayer (drywall texture sprayer) and drywall compound.
Prepping for texture sprayer
Put on protective goggles, mask, and clothing.
Basically, all you need to do, is to mix the compound into a consistency like heavy cream, by using water. Some adventurous types actually add in some sand or dust in order to make the compound even more textured. Test out the compound and sprayer on a spare sheet of board, that’s been placed vertically, to check the thickness. If it’s the consistency you like, it doesn’t clog up the nozzle, and doesn’t drip down the wall, that’s perfect.
Choose your texture, with a texture sprayer
You can use different nozzles and tips with your texture sprayer to have a variety of spray techniques. Just keep adjusting until you get the look you like. It’s a very personal taste: some people like much smoother surfaces with a texture like fine sandpaper, while others like a more organic feel, rather like the inside of an old French wine cellar. Just experiment with the tips and air pressure, until you’re happy with what you’re going to get. Now that you’re ready to use your texture sprayer on the walls, make sure that the furnishings (if there are any in the room) are all covered. It’s a really messy job, so take the extra time to cover up the floor, ceiling, and furnishings well, so you don’t need to scrape off later.
Spray the compound on the wall using even strokes, to cover the surface from top to bottom, in a consistent matter. The texture paint sprayer should give you consistent-sized blobs of the gunk, from the sizes of a small clump of sand, to about the size of a small coin. Allow the compound to set for about half an hour or so, checking after fifteen minutes, it becomes tacky to the touch. If you want to “knock down’ the bumps, now is the time to do it, using a trowel in vertical strokes to flatten it out slightly. The goal here is not to remove the texture but to flatten the peaks, giving the wall a rough, textured finish.
It’s done! All that’s left to do is to let the compound dry for 24 hours. If you want to add color, the wall should be painted first in the desired color and the compound tinted to match or contrast with the base. Otherwise, painting the wall makes it waterproof and nearly impossible to remove the texturing if desired later on.
A good brand of the texture sprayer is the graco texture sprayer. Graco is an awesome company that makes things such as drywall texture sprayer, wallboard texture sprayer. [ Since they are a good company, they don't sell used texture sprayers. If you are trying to save some money, there are places like craigslist that you may find a good deal on used texture sprayers.]
The only other company that I would recommend is Wagner. They make things such as the Wagner power texture sprayer. It runs around $80 to $90. It can apply popcorn, orange peels and knockdown textures on the things you work on. Most people use this for their walls and ceilings. Their texture sprayer has three texture settings.