Drywall Taping and Texture in Salt Lake City, Utah

Taping is the stage where a room either starts looking finished or starts looking patched. It is also the stage where mistakes are invisible at the time and obvious later, because a taped wall looks acceptable under a work light and then shows every ridge and hollow the moment it is painted and daylight hits it at an angle.

The work itself is unglamorous: tape bedded into the joints, coats built up and feathered wide enough that the transition disappears, corner beads set straight, then sanded back flat. Wide is the operative word — most visible joints are visible because somebody tried to finish them in a narrow band to save compound and time.

Texture is its own problem. Matching new texture into an existing wall is harder than texturing a whole room, because the eye picks up the seam between old and new far more readily than it picks up the texture itself. How close a match is achievable depends entirely on what is already on the wall, and that is something to look at rather than promise blind.

We tape board we have hung ourselves through drywall, and board that was already there. Painting follows on with the same crew, which means the surface is prepared by the people who have to paint it.