Yeah, it doesn’t look very different, but you’re looking at 2 days of work there. Skimming is using drywall mud to create a smooth surface on a wall—whether a newly taped wall or one that has texture that you no longer want. My case is the second: I’m putting up a wallpaper mural of magpies and birches on the largest wall in the powder room, and the wall was pretty strongly textured, so it took 2 coats to skim, each taking 24 hours to dry.
I’m not great at skimming, never really having done it before, so there are a few lines, bubbles, and shallow potholes in the finished result, some of which will sand out nicely and some of which won’t. It takes a lot of practice and skill to skim a wall well: you can watch this guy do it if you want to see how it should be done. But the job I did is good enough to wallpaper over 😉
I’m now 3 days behind schedule due to 2 extra days on demo and skimming, and 1 unscheduled migraine. But that’s the way these things go. And, hey, spoiler alert: it’s looking like I’ll be at least another week behind due to a miscommunication with the countertop fabricator. It wasn’t actually a miscommunication: they told me *twice* in December that they put me on their schedule for this week; but when I called yesterday to see where they were, they claimed they had told me they would put me on the schedule once they found a suitable remnant for me, whenever that was. Uh, no. But I’ve learned the hard way that you catch more flies with honey, so I just said, “Gosh, I misunderstood! Totally my fault. But now I’m standing here looking at a ripped-out countertop in my powder room. Is there anything you guys can do to help me?” They said they’d see what they had in the warehouse and call me back today—fingers crossed. If they don’t have anything, I’ll go back to the other wholesaler I was talking to and see if I can get something moving faster over there. Either way, like I said, it’s a week’s delay at least. But hey, it’s a powder room, and no one’s gonna die. I’ll just clear as many of the projects on my side as I can in the meantime so that once the countertop finally goes in, there’s not much left to finish.
The Rookery 