How to Repair Textured Walls

Have you ever made a decorating mistake? Me too. A TON, actually.

That’s what todays post is really all about… How I’m overcoming ‘decorating paralysis’ and undoing the mistakes I’ve made over the past few years. Oh, and of course I’m going to show you how to repair textured walls. That is the title of this post after all 😉

Back in mid 2011 when I started this blog, it was intended to be a fun way to share house and family updates with our family and friends that we moved away from. It was a way for me to express my love for decorating and homemaking. I felt like I was confident in what I liked and my style choices most of the time so why not share it with others, ya know? 🙂

Then I discovered other blogs, seasoned veteran blogs and Pinterest...

An online world where people from all over could share their creativity and everyone was an extremely crafty, creative, FANTASTIC decorator! It was so exciting, but super overwhelming all at the same time. It exposed me to so many more ideas than I ever could of thought of on my own. I wanted to do it all, try it all! Everything looked so beautiful and easy…

…but I suddenly didn’t feel like I knew what I was doing anymore when it came to decorating my own home.

The first “big” project I found on Pinterest in 2012 was board and batten. Everyone and I mean EVERYONE seemed to have it somewhere in their house. I loved it in every photo I saw and decided to tackle my own version of it using leftover scrap wood. {You can see that post here}

I liked it okay, but never really loved it. Also, notice the beige walls? So I froze, and stopped decorating not knowing where to go from there.

In 2013, I decided that painting all the walls white except for one wall in our dining room which I painted blue would get me out of my decorating slump, but it didn’t (actually it made things worse) and here we are approaching the end of 2014 and my house looks no more put together than it did in mid 2011. (see: first world problems)

It’s not really all that serious in the whole scheme of life, but it’s been bothering me, so thanks for letting me vent 😉

So, this past weekend I took a hammer to the board and batten wall. It felt amazing to get it down, and stop trying to “decorate” around something that I didn’t really ever LOVE. I think I left it up for as long as I did because I didn’t want to deal with repairing the walls, which was a silly excuse because the damage wasn’t terrible and was pretty easy to fix. Here’s how…

Once all the boards were pulled off the wall I was left with a bit a drywall damage, and caulk left behind. The first step was to scrape off the caulk. I started off using a flathead screwdriver, but then switched to a scraper.

Next, I sanded down all the edges that were lifted up to give me a somewhat smooth surface to add my spackle.

Lots of spackling…

After it was dry I would sand it to make sure it was level with the wall and smooth. Some spots needed another round of spackling and smoothing but that’s okay. I wanted to make sure the wall had the least amount of imperfections as possible.

Now because our walls are orange peel which is just like how it sounds- bumpy like the skin of an orange. I needed to use a texturizer to make the patch job look blended into the wall.

I picked this one up at Home Depot and chose it because you could adjust the amount of texture. Definitely test it out a few times on a piece of scrap wood or something first.

Our walls were somewhere in between the “fine” and “medium setting” and using a wide circular application motion while spraying gave me the most natural looking finish for our walls.

After it dried, if there was any large bumps or points, I sanded it lightly to flatten it.