Harold Howard is the owner of Harold Howard’s Painting Service, which is based in Columbia, Maryland, and serves Howard, Baltimore, Ann Arundel, Carroll, and Hartford counties. Along with both residential and commercial painting services, his company also offers drywall installation, wallpaper application and removal, and wall texturing. Here, he explains the types of wall textures and how texture is applied.
Texturing your wall or ceiling puts some type of grain in the wall’s finish. You might want to do it to achieve a different type of look. There are countless ways in which you could put texture on your wall or ceiling. But the following three are the most popular. They are all predominantly popular for ceilings, and are rarely used on the outside of houses. Most people only use texture on the inside because they don’t want to risk the elements destroying their work.
Stucco. Stucco is the main and most popular type of wall/ceiling texture. It has an even, prickly look and you have probably seen it many times in both homes and commercial buildings.
Popcorn. Popcorn texture also has a prickly look but the parts that stand out are thicker and look like kernels — hence the name. You can use a special popcorn texture sprayer to achieve this look. After you spray on the texture, you can paint.
Swirl. A swirl finish looks like a paintbrush has gone over the wall/ceiling in circular motions. While stucco and popcorn textures are most often used for ceilings, swirl finishes are often used to decorate walls as well.
All three of these techniques are achieved by applying a special spackle material (a white, pasty substance) to the wall, which needs just the right consistency. We apply it to the wall with a sponge or a special brush to get the textured effect, which takes longer than normal painting.
After applying the spackle material, we can paint the wall any color you want — in matters of color, we almost always defer to you. We usually spray the paint on top of the texture, but sometimes we roll it on too. When rolling on paint over a texture, we use a special roller which is thick and soft that will go into all the grooves.
