Dadvice: Painting Textured Walls

I hate textured walls. As far as I’m concerned, the only reason to texture a wall is to mask a subpar drywall job or worse yet, a crooked house frame. It’s not that I think it looks all that bad (it can, however) but it makes for tougher drywall repairs and makes painting a room (like a nursery) almost as frustrating as watching a pitcher take an at-bat…almost. Paint a textured wall at night with the overhead lights on, go back the next day and open the blinds to have a look at your work while illuminated by daylight. Then, try to avoid poking yourself in the eye with that free, Home Depot, wooden paint stick that nobody uses (Just shake the can and avoid the cleanup). All those nooks and crannies created from the stupid texture are still the old paint color, and the harder you look, the more you realize, “Well, this looks terrible! Better call the boss and take the rest of the week off and go back to Home Depot to pick up 17 more gallons of paint and 183 more paint sticks I’ll never use.”

But the worst part, by far, is where ceiling meets wall. I don’t think Michelangelo (the painter not the Turtle) could make that area look good given a whole year on a textured wall. Steady hands and painter’s tape are no match for the crevices found here. The result looks something like this:

My fix was a small, wooden block wrapped in 80 grit sandpaper.  I simply removed some of the texture where the ceiling and wall meet. The result was a much cleaner line:

You won’t be able to tell you sanded it down, so give it a try next time. Or, if you have money, throw some crown molding up there and don’t worry about any of this and spend the time you saved trying to figure out what to do with the 183 paint sticks.