TEXTURE Tips!! Create a Knockdown Texture FAST...

[Music] this is paint Life TV I'm the Ido painter and I'm journeyman John and we're here we're going to be talking about texturing walls we've got a texture machine right here this is the Graco Tech spray RTX RTX 1250 and we're texturing some walls we did wallpaper removal these wall these walls had some wallpaper on them we removed it using a steamer M and underneath them they were oil primed they were so they came off relatively easy not the easiest but you know you can't complain but like most of the time we remove wallpaper typically the walls are going to be smooth under there or we're going to have a lot of damage we going to have to retexture them and we have a texture a knockdown texture on this house right here John what what is a knockdown texture a knockdown texture is like an orange peel texture that uh what you'll do is you'll spray that texture on heavier than you would an orange peel maybe a little bit more in consistently and then you're going to take either a large knockdown knife or we'll end up using seen a just a 12in taping knife here uh to basically knock uh little plateaus over the top of all of those bumps and it creates just kind of a a finish that covers it's a little bit different than a an orange peel texture but it's what we have here that we need to match and that's what's uh the interesting thing we've traveled we've been to Australia we've been to the UK what we see outside of the United States and even outside of oo is a lot of level five finish and that's going to be just a completely Smooth Wall this is a Smooth Wall underneath here it is but in our local in our geographical area we see a lot of orange peel we see some knock down and then we see Sun Sun Valley texture what's a Sun Valley texture Sun Valley texture can also be called Santa Fe texture skip trout or whatever else you're going to tell us in the comments that it's also called but that's where you are basically going to tr or knife on some mud and you're going to have little pockets where it's missing but it's a relatively flat texture but it kind of gives it that old world almost a Venetian plaster kind of look in a way in my theory Pro you know here in our local you see a lot of orange peel texture cuz it's a lot less expensive to apply now a sun Valle of texture is a hand texture applied more labor intensive and so it's just going to make the cost of the house rise so we see a lot of orange peel and it also hides imperfections in the walls so we have a lot of imperfections right here what would it take to get this to become a level so to get a level five on what we've got here we would end up uh probably either loading up like a large sprayer in spraying mud or rolling some mud on it and just skim coating the entire thing and that's really the next step on these walls if you wanted to go to a level five like Chris said that's just not what's in the rest of the house we want to make sure it matches and this is kind of the norm kind of the standard in our area Y and these walls right here there's a few little imperfections in them after we pulled the wallpaper off we just patched them they're already primed so we're not going to Prime them before we texture we're going to spray the texture on knock it down and then we're going to prime it and paint it aren't we that's the plan and do you have any tips when it comes to texturing we got our texture right here you got to mix up your mud when it comes to a knockdown is there any secrets to mixing mud for knockdown you know when it comes to a knockdown usually what I'm looking for is the consistency of like a pancake batter I'll probably uh go a little bit more dry than that so it's a bit thicker because I want it to have some body uh this is a probably right about that pen cake texture a lot of it depends on the texture you're trying to match the the more dense or the heavier the knockdown or the orange peel texture is the less water and the thicker you want it to be but you can't go too thick or the pump isn't going to move it up to the top of the gun and then you're going to have to clean it all out and that that ends up being a bit of a mess so so the next thing is is there any secrets you're going to spray this texture on the wall you want to knock it down uh we got multiple different types of knives we're going to use for knock down uh how long do I wait do I wait uh 5 minutes do I knock it down right after do I wait 10 minutes what's the secret so you've got a pretty wide open time most of these uh this is just an an unaggregated spray texture mixture from from USG I think it's USG uh you've got about eight hours that it takes for this stuff to dry so probably anytime within that first hour you could go through and start knocking it down on this small of a section we're just going to spray it all turn the pump off and then start knocking it down you just got to be a little careful if you're doing it right after because everything's pretty fresh it hasn't started setting up but it also means you're not going to have issues with pulling dry aggregate through uh through your mud and and creating scars and then after that's all dry we're going to prime it we typically use water-based primers and one of the things if you don't prime it you're probably going to get a really inconsistent finish cuz the mud itself that's on the wall now is very porous and so you don't want to just roll paint right over the top of that also the paint's not going to bond and adhere as well what kind of primer are we going to be using specifically have we boughten that already so we haven't picked up a primer yet for this uh you could use something like a PVA primer you could which is going to be pretty cheap you could use um like a multi-surface or multi-purpose primer which is going to cost you a little bit more you could just use paint like a cheaper paint if you wanted but you're going to use a lot of it so our goal is we want to find something that's going to get a good Bond a good seal like a PVA primer and also be considerably cheaper than if we were using the expensive top coat that we'll put on these walls the tools and accessories that we use in our videos typically you can find them down in the video description if you want to learn a little bit more about them and I'm sure if you have any questions or comments we would like to hear them and so would you other people following us watching this video all right we're ready to fire up our machine we've got our mud in here this is a Graco texture sprayer if we were doing a small job we typically use it we would typically be using a hopper and that's just a gun and a hopper the mud would go on top of the hopper but we've been doing a lot of text in in this house where we REM wallpaper so we're using a bigger machine the mud goes on the top this machine on the side you can explain John a little bit about the knobs and stuff if you've never used one of the one of these machines what they mean yeah so this has a pump and an air compressor on it and what it's going to do is is uh you can do actually two things with this you can use just the air compressor and there is a hopper attachment if you want to use kind of more of the traditional uh method of doing that or if you've just got small touch-ups that you need to do um or you can use the pump the on board with this and it'll feed out of this 10g Hopper and send the mud and the air up to your gun so it's going to use the air to basically create pressure behind the gun it's going to kind of split everything up there are a couple different nozzle sizes you want to find a nozzle size that's relative to the texture that you're trying to match so the tighter the orifice on that nozzle the smaller texture that you're going to have this is kind of a mid llarge knockdown texture so we've got kind of the mid llarge orice on our nozzle here and that's worked pretty well for trying to find a match and if you've never used a machine like this it may look intimidating but it's not that difficult to use right it's a piece of cake there's literally an onoff switch there's a uh a hopper or no Hopper switch so that'll turn the the pump for this Hopper off and only use air and then there's a little pressure gauge I almost always run it at full pressure and then I use the trigger to control how much material is coming out the more you pull pull that trigger back the more material is going to come out and the heavier of a texture you've got so using a little Fe a little feel with your trigger you're going to be able to really kind of fine tune how that texture looks as it's going out now when you're spraying some people are going to probably see like some type of pattern to what you're doing we're probably going to be spraying like a circular pattern um and what's that going to look like yeah so what I'll do is along the edges usually I'll run one row and then I'll kind of weave a circle into that and on the next pass I'll overlap 50% and weave another circle into that and the reason I do a circle pattern is is because I don't want flashing the the problem is if I end up just doing one line another line another line in between them tends to show some inconsistencies and so that'll really show up after it's all painted when the light hits it you'll just see these lines going along the wall and that's not a good look so a circle kind of woven together overlapping is definitely the way to go in order to hide any of that flashing imperfection about how far away you going to stay away from the wall you know some of it depends on how thin the mud is and the kind of look I'm going for uh similar to like with an hlp you'll kind of feel that out a little bit depending on the pressure um I'm going to be probably about 18 maybe 12 in away from the wall kind of depending again how much I pull that trigger back um one more thing too is you need to keep in mind this is about 50% water probably a little less than 50% water which means whatever you spray up on the wall is going to shrink by about about 40 to 50% so you want to air on the side of being a little bit bigger it's going to shrink down and so when you're looking and you're trying to match the ceiling or other walls keep those things in mind too one of the nice things about this St water-based mud it's very simple easy to use if you make a mistake it's really easy just to wipe it off take it off sand it down get rid of it and that's how you learn so if you get it some spots on this wall that just don't look good what are you going to do John if I get some spots on the wall that don't look good depending on what it is you know we'll probably let it dry we'll we'll sand it down if we need to sand it down or if I need to do a little touchup texture I can do some touch-up texture we'll just kind of see what the errors are there will be some knife Marks here and there just because the walls aren't perfectly flat and we're trying to work in those Contours on the wall those are all things after it dries it's easy to kind of sand out fill in and make sure that it all looks good when it's all said and done all right let's get to work all right there you have it we got our text rine all done you got it all knocked down John it looks great hey if anybody's got any tips or tricks leave them in the the comments down there below people do things differently than we do all over the place yeah um do you got anything else to share John before we take off and get out of here you know I think just like Chris said earlier feel give it a try give it a shot this is a relatively easy thing to fix if you make a mistake you let it dry uh you can take water you can take sandpaper you can start bringing that back down retexture it's really pretty easy to fix the issues it's just going to take time but give it a shot and see how you do yeah we're going to get on to the priming and painting process now hey if you haven't followed us 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