Decorate With Special Plaster Interior Textures

You are building a new home, your dream home, in a Spanish or Southwestern (US) style.

You have lots of decisions to make, regarding both the basic structure of your house and the decorative aspects of its interior.

Have you given any thought to the wall and ceiling textures?

The Southwestern flavor of your house lends itself well to certain hand-applied wall and ceiling textures. Often called "Spanish" or "Mediterranean", these are unique and attractive compliments to your window treatments, your wall art and your furnishings.

It may be that your general contractor is already knowledgeable in this area, and can point you where you might want to go with this.

But I would also like to offer you some personal suggestions to increase your decorating options.

Some situations lend them selves nicely to a smooth, no texture, effect.

But more often than not, clients want a textured interior, and the choices are many, although certain textures tend to be chosen more often.

In response to customer need, I developed a number of textures, ranging from very light, soft ones to rougher more abrasive textures, in a variety of patterns.

Some in particular fit well in a Southwestern home style.

I will show you a couple of these. You can in turn show them to your contractor.

Or ...

Maybe you have a strong do-it-yourself streak. You might want to try these out and see if they work for you.

Texturing can be a lot of fun. You get to take this clean "mud" and play with the tools and experiment with the results. I have had a number of people over the years pay me to teach them how. Some proved to be pretty adept.

This comes in two basic versions: with and without sand. I prefer the sanded version, because it enables me - the applicator - to give a uniform thickness to the individual "islands."

Place about a cup of texture mud on your plasterer's hawk. Spread it out a little, then pat your trowel into the mud, leaving little peaks on the blade.

Now very gently pat your trowel on the ceiling.

You are transferring the peaks to the ceiling.

Continue doing this until you have an area maybe two or three feet square. Now, using a six inch wide drywall taping knife, very gently flatten the peaks, creating the "islands."

If you find that you are moving fairly fast, you may want to do a larger area on the ceiling before you flatten the peaks. In any case, you want the drywall or plaster ceiling to have time to suck some of the extra moisture from your texture and stiffen it. This makes it easier to flatten properly.

Another texture I often do is a rough sanded plaster-looking application with some swirling in it. Most appropriately, it is a wall texture. How much swirl you may want to do is up to you.

Trowel the surface with a thin layer of the texture material, then create the swirl effects by varying strokes over the area with the trowel held flat and with light pressure.

You can leave the roughness in place when you are done, or flatten it some a little later with a six inch drywall taping knife.

You can play with the trowel and get different subtle results. In addition, the thickness of the mix will yield different effects. It's usually a good idea to experiment on a scrap of drywall, an old garage wall or whatever - to get something you like, before you put it on the wall for real.

And, even there, you can always scrape it off while wet if you want to try again.

Have fun, and remember ... this is a learning experience. You don't have to master it immediately.