apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Maxwell's assessment is right on (quick and cheap being the operative words!)

As far as sanding -- yes, this is probably a big mistake. Assuming this is an old apartment (pre-early 70's) you are dealing with a LOT of lead paint, and quite possibly asbestos. If this is a rental, paint it a favorite color and deal with it. If you own, then get professional help.

There is such a thing as sound proofing paint which has small particles of ceramic in the paint and which is supposed to reduce sound by 30% -- it may be that they used that for shared walls? Also, sometimes texture is applied to hide settling cracks.

the master bedroom of our house had high end textured ralph lauren paint (almost fuzzy velvet looking). every painter we enlisted for wisdom had a different approach to tackle it ... sanding, respakle, using oil based paint, painting lots of coats (oy!) ... we sanded it before repainting, which did most of the trick but there is still a residual texture when you look closely. this is a different scenario i think ...

My whol apt. is covered in this stuff - when there was chipping or gouging in the walls, this was the easiest way to cover up rather than replaster (over plaster walls of course). Two words: Sloppy workmanship.

It looks similar to stucco. My parent's house had it all over the dining room ceiling and all over the cathedral ceiling in the living room. There was also similar textured walls in the home I lived at when I was little. Maybe it isn't stucco (however you spell it) as apparently the picture doesn't represent what your talking about very well, but sanding it flat is one hell of a mess. Dust for days that only a shop-vac could handle because vacuuming it up with a normal vacuum would sand down the inner parts. My dad just completely ripped down the ceiling and walls when he re-did the hallway in their new home. It may be cheaper (instead of multiple coats of paint) and less time consuming and have a better look overall, if your use to and up for the challenge. If it's a rental...I'm sorry, I've been dealing with stucco ceiling in my place (old building from the 50s) for the past year. You'll eventually get over it. Good luck!

I would suggest having someone put a nice skim coat of plaster over it to level it out. May need one or two coats depending how rough the texture is. It will give it a much softer look.

I was just looking at apartments, and the realtor told me this stuff was called "popcorn," and was used (on ceilings, in this case) to hide imperfections, as other people have said. I agree that it's not something it would be safe to tackle yourself...better to use simple decorating tricks to try to call attention away from it. I remember admiring a friend's apartment and it wasn't until I had been over several times that I realized her less-than-perfect popcorned ceilings and walls. So it's not a fatal flaw.

I think the trick is to hang slightly bulkier frames or lights to keep the eye on stuff that's at least a few inches from the surface you want to hide. That way it fades into the background.

It is often known in the trade as "knock-down" texture, and used to cover imperfections and repairs.

Very common on the west coast, and used since the advent of drywall (I grew up with it), but fortunately, it has finally fallen out of favor over the past few years. As technology, tools, and materials have improved over the years, drywall can be installed with fewer imperfections, thereby negating the need for knock down texture.

I had to patch a hole in an apartment wall that had been covered with this stuff, and was able to buy a small quantity used for patching in an aerosol can. I sprayed it on, waited a few minutes, and used a spackle knife to "knock down" the peaks (and create the look).

Usually, if you have this, it is covering up something underneath, and if you want really smooth walls, you will need to either completely replace the drywall, have new plaster done, or cover what you have with a thin layer of new drywall.

The popcorn stuff that's on ceilings is more textured than the wall stuff. I actually painted some rooms when I was in college and that texture stuff actually came in big old pickle and was opaque, beige and vaguely gelatinous. It was applied with a special kind of roller that was kind of like a rag roller, if I recall correctly. One really DID need to spackle and sand as well as possible FIRST anyway, but for some reason it was popular, and I guess it was to hide flaws. But it was really a pretty standard thing to do there for a while. I'm talking about the mid-1980's.

It's not popcorn. It's sprayed-on texture, using thinned joint compound, or "mud". It's commonly used to hide imperfections. There are several degrees of texture, such as 'orange peel', 'splatter', 'eggshell', etc. It's sprayed on using a compressor, sprayer and hopper. Popcorn is bits of styrofoam that have been added to the mud, and that's for ceilings. Most new construction these days utilizes sprayed-on texture, since it's quicker and way cheaper than obtaining a smooth finish. I HATE textured walls.... so cheap looking! Get someone to skimcoat your surfaces.

Justin nailed it, it's sprayed on joint compound essentially. With paint on top. You don't know when the sprayed on texture arrived in the history of the paint layers, could be in between to hide some bad wavy plastering.

One way painters deal with it is to mist/spray it down with water and scrape it away. Since it's joint compound it'll just disentegrate under water. However you will have to deal with the top paint layers. Very messy.

I say go with it (if you get the apt) and put more texture on them walls to get rid of that pimply wall look.

My husband is a drywall finisher by trade, and his specialty is untexturing textured walls. Someone needs to come in and wet it, scrape it, sand, float it, and prime it. DH refers to this as getting to 'Level Five Smooth.'

We just dealt with this in our hallway. Skimcoating is the way to go (well for us it was - we were afraid of what was underneath). It looks so much better and it's not as much work as you might think.

Here in TX, it's quite common and is definitely used to help soundproof. I don't really like the look of it, but I'm told apartment life would be unbearable without it.

weird, i have the same stuff on my walls and never even noticed it until now.

crap, now it's going to drive me CrAZy!!!!

;)

In Denmark a lot of people use wall paper with chunky or fine wood chips in it and it looks exactly the same as in your picture. We just stripped an apartment worth of it from the walls!

In germany most of the flats have this kind of texture on the walls - it is a wallpaper that people specially put on the wall before painting whatever colour - keeping the sandy texture.

So, if its like in Germany its just wallpaper and u can easily strip it down.

P.S. Maybe u should keep it as a feature, and think of it as sandy beaches instead ;)

Good luck

Jessica

If it is there make a feature of it. Be bold, be brave! Paint the walls and then with a tiny brush paint each bump with a tiny blob of gold metalic paint. Within months every one in NYC will be doing it!

I painted an entire railroad flat in Astoria with this stuff--the original wall moldings had been carelessly torn off and badly patched. It gave the apartment a really nice feel visually, not so much when you brushed against a wall, though.

How-to: pretty simple. We just mixed in it with the paint and rolled it on.

I had my entire house skimcoated. I had some kinda wierd uneven texture (I'm in CA in a 1916 bungalow.) A painter or even you if you're up to it, takes some dry wall mud and a trowel and kind of frosts the walls. If they're good at it they only need to sand a little. I'm really bad at it so I had to sand it more and I made a mess. You can buy the dry wall bud allready mixed in a bucket. My painted mixed his own with some kinda powder but if you're doing it yourself just buy the stuff in the big bucket and start frosting the walls.

I believe that skimcoating is the only way to solve the problem, and it is an easy fix.

Hmmm, so it looks like we’re just going to clean and paint it for now, and learn to live with the texture. Skimcoating is expensive, no? Thanks for all the input and advice!

Skimcoating is a big task, so no, it's not cheap.

Light texturing often looks better with an eggshell paint than with a flat.

Heavier texturing can sometimes be made less annoying if you put an almost-same-color glaze over flat paint -- the effect makes the texture look "on purpose" and gives the wall some dimension, rather than having it look completely "what were they thinking?"

Textured walls are so normal here in the West -- it's a finish sprayed on the drywall -- but I can see that it'd look weird in a pre-War flat.