Texture matching

What the work is

Texture is the reason most drywall repairs look like repairs. The patch is flat and the wall around it is not, so the eye finds it instantly under any light that comes across the surface.

Matching is part identification and part practice. Knockdown, orange peel, splatter, skip trowel and hand-applied textures each come from a different tool and a different consistency of compound, and the same name covers a range of coarseness. We test on a board first, hold it against the wall, adjust, and only then shoot the repair.

There is an honest limit to this. A texture that was hand-applied by one person twenty years ago has that person's rhythm in it, and an exact match across a large area is not always achievable. When that is the case the better answer is often to retexture a whole wall to a corner, so the eye has no boundary to find, and we will tell you when that is what it takes.

Then it gets primed and painted, because new texture absorbs differently from old and a repair that is perfectly matched in texture can still show as a dull patch through the finish coat.

What is on the walls here, and why

Of Washington County's 88,415 housing units, 7,613 were built before 1980 and 91% went up in 1980 or later. That is an unusually young housing stock, and it decides what you are matching: the textures that came with those decades are machine-applied knockdown and orange peel, not hand-worked plaster.

That is good news for matching. A sprayed and knocked-down texture is repeatable by someone who has done it enough times, and the variation is in the coarseness of the mix and how long it is left before it is knocked down, both of which we test on a board first.

The older parts of St. George, Washington City and Hurricane are where it gets harder, and where hand-applied work turns up. There the honest answer is sometimes to retexture a whole wall to the corner rather than chase an exact match across a patch.