Backpacking the Eagle Rock Loop in the Ouachita National Forest
Grace
October 23, 2020
Menu
We have orange peel texture, but from my experience I have not had much luck matching the texture with spray textures, and our wall was pretty big, so this would’ve been so much more difficult and expensive! I did research about orange peel texture and found that there is a specific product for exactly this, but I’ll go a long way to make what I already own work for us.
After some experimenting and honestly what feels like very good luck, we were able to perfectly match the texture in our house!
Paint spray nozzle – we had this Graco 621, but most nozzles should work!
Shower Squegee or a drywall squeegee if you prefer!
Tape off anything that you don’t want sprayed! Including floors and up to three feet around the area you plan on spraying. There will be overspray!
Dump an entire 3.5 quart container of joint compound in to a clean bucket. Keep the now empty container of joint compound and fill it about 1/4 full with water. Dump the water in the bucket and use your drill and mixer to mix the joint compound and water. The mixture should be about the same consistency as latex paint or pancake batter. It needs to be thin enough to be able to run through your paint sprayer.
Put your paint sprayer together with the nozzle and hand-tight guard and run the joint compound mixture through the sprayer. When it’s running through, you can start spraying!
We played with different settings on our sprayer and eventually figured out that it worked best with the nozzle turned the wrong direction.
We set up large pieces of cardboard in our yard to test spray on before we were ready to bring it to the wall. We also found that the distance away from your wall made a difference. We stood 6 feet away from the wall to get the texture that we were going for.
Standing 6 feet away from the wall, we started spraying. The trick here is to move your hand quickly and in small motions for an even texture.
To take the stress out of messing up, keep a squeegee nearby and you can scrape off any mistakes and try again! We had to do that in several sections and can’t notice it.
The last step is to finish the job with primer and paint. Don’t skip the primer step! Priming prepares your wall for better adhesion of paint, increases paint durability, and provides extra protection for the material being painted.
This post was written for the Collected Eclectic blog.
Collected Eclectic was a passion project focused on recording the process as Grace and Michael van Meurer transformed their builder grade home in to something special.
124 blog posts were published between 2018 and 2021. Explore the complete Collected Eclectic archive here.
Learn more about the project here.