Smoothing old drywall

[Pat]

Thin out the drywall mud until you can roll it on with a paint roller. Then use a wide trowel to scrape it off.

[Rich]

Nope put your head down and fill everything that you find. It shouldn't take that long once you get to it. The effort will be worth it in the end short cuts are to be used when coming home from school not when doing real work.

Rich

[Eugene Nine]

I'm redoing a room and it has really rough drywall, lots of dents and scratches, I've been filling all the big ones, but keep finding more and more spots that need filled. Anyone know if there is a thick paint that will fill all the small holes so I don't have to try and patch every single inch of wall?

[G Henslee]

It's easy to just skim coat the entire wall(s). Wide knife, yes. Makes a nice surface then for a new texture, sprayed or by hand.

[Eugene Nine]

Problem is there are so may little dings I wall basically be recovering the whole room, guess its time to get out the wide trowel.

[Pop]

Ummmnnnm, just a dumb question: The drywall IS in tact, right? Not loose and falling off or pieces ready to fall off? Pieces of the drywall paper cov ering missing, things like that?

Pop

[Eugene Nine]

Actually, I've been in the house for 10 years, this is about the last room I have touched, all the rest of the rooms I did what you said in all the other rooms but this one is just terrible, there isn't a smooth spot on any wall in this room which is why I was looking for some bulk way to patch, I was hoping there would be some trick other than taking weeks to patch all the spots or replace the drywall (I had to do that in the bathroom since it was non moisture resistant)

[Eugene Nine]

Yea, the drywall is solid, it just has tiny dents everywhere and patched from previous owners and dents in the patches.

[Doug Kanter]

Welcome to home ownership. Get a halogen worklight and move it around until it reveals the shadow of every obnoxious little defect. Unless you're talking about gashes the size of a banana, it shouldn't be such a big deal to fix them.

[Joseph Meehan]

I agree this is the way to go. If you have some larger dents, hit them first to bring them close to flat, then do the whole wall in one skim coat. It really does not take that long and the results are very nice.

[jeffc]

They do make a "filler" paint, but it won't work well for anything other than the tiniest spots. What you want to do is thin the compound just a bit and put it in a pail and apply it with a paint roller. Trowel it off with a

12" taping knife.

[BocesLib]

Two (actually three) ways of doing this..

Put a light against the wall and it'll show you EVERYTHING. Get lots of mud and away you go...

Put up the thinnest sheetrock you can find. Basically covering up the old walls with new. (this will also provide some limited sound deadening too)

Option three is the worst case of tearing out the old rock and putting up new. Not a bad option if the room has issues like poor electrical. no isulation in the walls etc. Its the biggest job out of the bunch but you are rebuilding it (hopefully correctly)