Sheetrock Repair

Our living room repair project.

Our living room was in pretty bad shape. The walls had been patched in a number of places, and a fair sized section of the ceiling had been replaced. The repair work had a different texture than the portions of the wall and ceiling that had not been repaired. Every repair that had ever been made to the walls and ceiling was plainly visible. The paint job had also gotten very dingy looking over the past three years(burning the gas logs caused a lot of this). We scraped and cleaned for about two hours in order to get ready to work on the plaster. We scraped the walls and ceiling with four inch sheetrock knife and hand sanded the really bad spots. We also scraped off any loose, blistered, or peeling sheetrock tape from any previous repairs. Repairing the plaster took three short days because we had to let the mud dry completely between coats(tape/bed/skim). The next step was to sand all the repairs in order to get them smooth. When we were done the repairs still did not blend in at all with the areas that had not been repaired.

In order to eliminate the difference in texture we decided to completely retexture the walls and ceiling. I thought it would be an awful lot of work and so I was not looking forward to this task. Once we got started I was really surprised at how quickly the job went. Our living room is fourteen feet by twenty two feet and we were able to do the entire room in under one hour.

We thinned sheetrock mud until it was like very thick paint. I then rolled it on the ceiling while my son came along behind me wiping it down hard with a twelve inch sheetrock knife before it had a chance to dry. All of the excess that he wiped off was dumped back into the mud bucket to be reapplied. When we were through with the ceiling we did the walls. As I said earlier it was not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. We then cleaned up after ourselves and called it a day(a two hour day).

Day six would prove to be a short day but a very messy day. We very lightly sanded the walls and ceiling with a sand pole and some 120 grit sandpaper. After that we cleaned up and then spent about an hour just nitpicking the little imperfections that we saw.

Day seven we painted the walls and ceiling, rehung the ceiling fan, and cleaned up one last time. The next project we do in here will probably be to cover up those ugly tile on the fireplace with brick unless someone of you out there has a better idea.

How to repair different problems.

1. Return to sheetrock repair home page.
2. Repairing cracks in sheetrock or plaster.
3. Repair a small hole.
4. Repair a large hole.
5. What we did in the living room.(you are here)
6. Project cost
7. Go to the Home Repair sitemap.

Check back tomorrow.
Or better yet, go check out The Garden

If we did not explain this to your satisfaction or if you disagree with the way things are being done, please join our forum to ask a question or to offer advice.

copyright© J and L constr.