Repairing Sheetrock on Basement Walls

LESLIE: If you’re listening to The Money Pit on KZNT, you might be Steve from Colorado. How can we help you?

STEVE: Do you guys know of a solution to – I guess you would call it a bad homeowner’s sheetrock job.

TOM: A bad spackle job, huh?

STEVE: Well, what he did is he refinished the basement, put up the sheetrock and then he taped it and looks like he sort of tried to finish it. But every joist and every seam shows and then it was – looks like he – instead of – it wasn’t like splattered on with a machine. It was more like rolled on with a paint roller brush.

TOM: Almost like textured?

STEVE: Yeah. And my question was – I’m trying to figure out is there any way to redo that or would I have to …?

TOM: Well, what you’re going to have to do is get that surface as smooth as possible. Now this is a wall or a ceiling?

STEVE: Both.

TOM: Both. Alright. Well …

LESLIE: That’s a big job.

TOM: Yeah, that’s a big job. (chuckling) It’s a – it’s a big, stinking mess. You’re going to have to get as much of that texture off as you can. And because it’s spackle, it’s only going to come off if you sand it. If it ends up being too much of a project, what you might want to do is just resurface that by putting another layer of drywall on top of it.

LESLIE: Yeah, if you can afford the half-inch loss of space all around.

TOM: Or even quarter-inch.

LESLIE: Yeah, true. Because otherwise, there’s going to be so much dust. It’s going to be a giant mess and you need to make sure that you get everything out of that basement and contain that area so well so that that dust doesn’t escape to the rest of the house. And you must make sure that you properly, you know, dress yourself with respirators and clothing so that you just don’t get covered in the stuff.

STEVE: Right. But then you’re saying maybe just go ahead and re-sheetrock.

TOM: Yeah, go ahead and skim the whole thing. You know, a good example of this is what I did in my house. We had plaster walls that were uneven. And in the first room, we decided to take the plaster walls down but it was just such a big mess that in the next couple of rooms I decided it wasn’t so important to take the plaster walls down (chuckling) and I just put new sheetrock right on top of the old plaster and that worked just perfectly.

Steve, thanks so much for calling us at 888-MONEY-PIT.