Taken out of con-texture

I got paint last night. We intended to paint the kitchen our pretty blue color. Such things did not occur. You know why? Freakin' texture again. I swear that texture is the bane of a homeowner's existence. It's not that I was attempting to apply texture this time. No, I learned my lesson. I'm going to avoid that as much as possible.

What I was doing was removing texture. Let me show you what I mean. We had the handyman come in and patch a few small areas where texture had rubbed off. I looked at it and thought it wouldn't work. I'm a perfectionist in many ways, though, so I got multiple other opinions. Everyone else thought it would be okay. Here's what it looked like when I painted over it.

I don't know if you can really see it, but it's flat. Flat like there's no texture there at all. I only painted a small part of this wall just to see what it would look like, and it looks bad. It's a swatch of smooth in a sea of texture. Totally not cool.

This is another area where we had texture material filling in the actual texture. It starts about 5.5' high and goes all the way to the floor. Thankfully we hadn't painted over this yet, so I could still just scrub it away with a sponge.

Much better.

And this is what all that texture was meant to be covering. Very, very small chips of texture missing. I understand that you have to feather the new texture out a bit to get it to blend, but you don't need to cover the whole wall with texture to cover up tiny half-inch square chips. On the plus side, after having lived with the giant swaths of texture for months now, the tiny chips in the texture are bothering me much less than they were. I've also added some new tools and skills to my repertoire, so I think I can fix them much more easily even without the spraying. Here's an attempt on another part of the wall:

These are some pretty big chunks taken out of the texture here. I sponged off all the extraneous texture until I was left with this.

Then I used my torn up sponge (you remember that, right?) to lay some joint compound on here. I hadn't really thinned it, so it went on pretty globby. I let it set for a while and knocked it down. It's no perfect. but it is a significant improvement over the big flat area that was there before and the big chunks of texture that were missing.

Here it is with a coat of primer. The little circle on the left may need a touch of putty in it, but other than that, I'm pretty pleased. Maybe my makeshift sponge creation actually does have a use after all!

So anyway, that's about all we did last night. We scrubbed a lot of texture off the walls and pulled the mirror in the powder room to prep for paint. My loving wife also re-cleaned the powder room, which was a big job. That's the cats' bathroom so it can get a little grungy. Still, we got the paint for it and we're almost ready to prime. I think it will look like a whole new room in there once we get the new color on the walls.

I'll let you know how it all goes, of course. Thanks for reading!