DIY: How To Smooth Out Textured Walls

First off, thank you SO much to everyone who has commented, prayed, sent good thoughts, etc. about this little babe of ours. You all are truly the best!
Over this past weekend, J was able to tackle a huge project in the nursery. We have a vision of having all the walls be board and batten. In order for this {in our opinions} to look really great, the walls should be smooth to start. Also, by having smooth walls, we are able to simply paint the white for the B&B rather than hang tile backer sheets like we did in our living room. Funny/embarrassing life lesson/sad story: when we first moved in this house we hired someone to smooth out the top 1/2 of all the walls in the dining room and living room. They did beautiful work, and they charged us $1,800. No freaking joke. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves in to when we first got this house, so at that point we didn't even 'shop around' for people, we just went with the first crew we saw. It seriously kills us that we paid that much, and for such a small amount of walls. A few months after that, once we were really in our groove of DIYing the crap out of our house, J attempted to smooth out our hallway walls. Easy-peasy..and probably cost $20 for all the supplies. 
Our whole house has fairly textured walls. Im not talking popcorn status, but definite texture. The nursery is no different, so J had his work cut out for him. Here is what we were working with:

Our process is simple:

• Begin by lightly scraping off any obnoxiously high bumps from the wall with your trowel

• Next, apply the plaster evenly with your trowel: {no, it is not a requirement to wear hideous outfits while doing said step, its just what we prefer over here..love you J!;)  J used a rounded trowel and went in a semi circular motion when applying the spackle.  The key is to fill in the low spots or holes and any high spots can be sanded down later.

• Next, before plaster has much time to dry, we rubbed the walls with a damp sponge. A lot of tutorials that we had read didn't say to do this, but we thought it would help to spread the plaster a little more evenly in the tiny bumps. Turns out, the others were right with not doing this, because it didn't help much! You can ignore this step altogether, but just wanted to share with you what we did:)

• Now the toughest part, wait for it all to dry. It felt like it was taking forever that day to dry, so J gave up waiting on it and decided to do the next step the next day. You can tell when it is completely dry when 1: its dry to the touch 2: it has all turned white, instead of the off white/yellow color:

• Be sure to do this step before the next. Be sure to seal up anything and everything that you don't want mounds of dust in. This stuff goes everywhere. We sealed the vent, the outlets, the windows, and even the door once he was in there..and it still managed to seep through the bottom of the door and go in the hallway. How the heck does dust always do that?!

• Now the strenuous part, sanding. J said it was a serious workout... I say its easy..because I didn't do it;) We bought a sander thingie in hopes that the sanding would be more consistent throughout the walls, high and low. It took him four hours to sand the entire room.  Key here is applying consistent pressure when using the sanding block thingie {you can tell a DIY blog from a professional website by the language and use of the word 'thingie'}

Make sure to wear a mask so you dont inhale all the drywall dust and get ready to get lots of dust in your beard and hair :).  I am saving the after photos for when we get a coat of primer/paint on it {and I didn't get a good photo in the daylight}.  It doesn't look that different as of now but it feels so smooth.  It's definitely not perfect but $50 is a whole lot less than it would have cost to hire someone......and this will allow us to spend money in other places.

Have you ever smoothed out your own walls? Any tips you want to share for everyone?

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