"What on Earth are you doing?!?!?"

"What on Earth are you doing?!?!" Was the startling exclamation from John when he walked in one evening after his run to find me on the floor of our dining room smearing Joint Compound all over the walls. Actually, his comment was something more along the lines of "What the H. E. Double Hockey Sticks.... are you doing?" But I thought 'Earth' was a nice replacement. : )

Sometimes I will get a burr in my saddle and start a project, whether or not it is a good idea. The area that is our dining room is the space that was both the living and dining room when we were kids. The room was going to absolutely have to be painted and there are some spots that really needed repair from various toys, old nails etc creating holes.

When John left for his run I was mentioning that I might go ahead and fill in the holes with Joint Compound. Well, I didn't like what it looked like and said, oh how hard could it be to texture the entire wall? I had seen the texture style done at a couple of different houses and knew they did it themselves so I figured I could do it too.

Using cheap plastic putty knives and a large bucket of Joint Compound I smeared heaping amounts of the putty on the walls in varying, short choppy strokes. What I didn't do however, was tape my door frames, baseboards or remove fixtures. Speaking from experience, you should always do this!! I have now added another step to this lovely project since I will have to sand the compound off our pretty wood wall plates, frames and baseboards.

Also, if you plan on doing this project yourself; I recommend using smaller amounts of Compound to start with. It isn't fun to have to go back over if it looks too light but, it sure beats the sections that I got carried away on and have now cracked. This is not really a project that can be split between two people. I tried to let John do a part of one wall and it isn't that he didn't do a great job, because he did!! It is just that if you don't match the patterns in the texture (although there is no "real" pattern, it is all just random) and make the same strokes it doesn't look the same at all! I had to go back over what he did and work to make it match my work.

So, if you have been paying attention to my posts you are probably as impressed as I am that it appears that (**for the most part**) I did a DIY home improvement project from start to finish. Well, don't be. : (
Remember how I was telling you that there are neat little stacks of boxes and piles of our belongings throughout the house where we haven't been able to really "move-in" for stuff we still need to move out etc. Our walls reflect that perfectly. I'm texturing 2 walls in the room since one of those walls runs from the dining room into the kitchen and I thought it would look awkward if it abruptly stopped in the kitchen (where we still have hideous wall paper) or only one wall was textured in the kitchen. The shorter of the two walls has a very large entertainment center sitting against it that will eventually be moved out (very heavy, giving it away on craigslist in exchange for labor to get it out of my house!!) so I could only texture a quarter of that wall. On the other longer wall there are entire sections that are textured from the ceiling down but toward the base there are box shaped sections of non-textured walls where I couldn't get to them for our stuff. : (

It's like we can't do anything constructive for all the projects that we need to get to but can't for various reasons.

As I've unpacked those boxes and found homes for the items I've continued texturing down the wall, it will be finished eventually I assume.

In the unlikely event that you too are texturing your walls in segments: If you taper off your compound you can pick up where you left off over lapping into your pre-existing textures without a difference.

**UPDATE** We have finished one whole wall!! - John was out of work between jobs for a week. We were stressed about it at first, but it turned out to be a huge blessing! He was able to get so much work done on the house!! With him being home during the days while I was working he got so much stuff unpacked, boxes consolidated and stuff we don't need in the house moved to storage!!

That freed me up to finish the long wall. We're still blessed with having our large ugly entertainment center in the dining room and that is putting a krimp on my ability to finish that wall, but one day it will be done! I have hope!!