Years ago I did a bunch of ceilings and the craze was mixing drywall compound into paint or rather paint into compound. The compound was too stiff and not hard enough on its own to work like a finish plaster to do swirls and such. So we would add some latex paint to the mud and it would spread out nice and could be swirled with a stiff brush. The other advantage is you could tint the mud with the paint and the surface was much tougher than mud alone.
Fast forward 30 years to this house I’m doing now and over the weekend I had a small room to be used as a walk in closet (6’ x 9’
and it needed spruced up but I didn’t want to spend the time gutting it so I patched a few holes and cracks with drywall mud and mesh tape sanded a little and figuredI would paint it and if I really felt the need in a few years go back and do a better job. I had some latex white wall paint and it seemed runny so I added some drywall compound at a rate of about 50%. Mixed it good and rolled it on the ceiling. It looked and covered so good I went at the walls next. It covered so nice and dried so smooth i was quite happy with the result.
I needed to coat all the drywall ceilings down in the livingroom and media room new finished drywall so I bought a bulk 5 gallon of Wal-Mart flat white and mixed it about 2 gal paint 1 gal mud and did the ceilings and walls in the living room. The walls are lath and horse hair plaster circa 1900 and the mixture did the ceiling great and acted as a great primer for the walls, IMHO.
I was wondering if anyone else was doing this or has tried it? It’s worked good for me and I’m not recommending the method as a tested approach for the DIY but I know I will be doing the exact same thing throughout the house.
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