When we last left off, we had moved all of our stuff out of our garage and were prepping for drywall finishing. We decided to hire this out since it would have taken a long time to finish if we could only work on it a couple hours here and there after work. I wanted to finish the garage makeover pretty quickly so it made sense to not DIY the drywall finishing.
When planning large projects that involve hiring out certain tasks, build a lot of time into your timeline for this! Luckily, the drywall company we used was able to schedule our job for a little over a week from when I received the cost estimate. The actual job only took a day which was amazing!
Here’s what it looked like when they were first starting out. They had to re-tape and mud the seams in certain areas. The tape was peeling off the wall and had never been coated properly when the house was built. We decided to finish the walls (and not just paint them) because of this issue.
Textured walls are common here in the Southwest but that seemed weird in a garage, so I asked the company to recommend a “smooth” type of texture. They suggested something called modern/contemporary skip trowel. Here’s a close-up of what the texture looks like:
To me the walls look almost like a plaster finish which I really like 🙂 Here’s the entire garage right after they finished the walls and ceiling. Many areas were still drying which is why it looks patchy.
Here’s another picture after it dried and it starting to look more uniform. Before we had a chance to paint, our garage cabinets arrived! That said–please excuse the mess in the rest of the pictures since we had to work around them.
Before painting the walls and ceiling, we primed everything with KILZ PVA Drywall Primer for new drywall. It’s only $10.97/gallon and definitely helps seal the walls before painting so you don’t have to use as much paint. We used 2 gallons for the walls and ceiling. The primer actually made the walls look beautiful and I almost didn’t want to paint over it!
I love white walls so much but we decided white wasn’t practical for this space since we often brush against the walls as we’re trying to get out of our cars, carry groceries into the house, etc. We did paint the ceiling Behr Ultra Pure White using Behr Premium Plus Flat Ceiling Paint. For the walls we choose Valspar Silver Leaf 4006-1A and had it color matched in Behr in Eggshell. It’s the perfect light blueish gray!
If you’re painting your garage, please ask your local experts if they recommend an interior or exterior paint. Our garage door is insulated and attached to the house. We also don’t tend to have extreme weather and it’s a dry climate so we went with interior paint. If you experience bigger temperature shifts and/or have more moisture, it would probably be better to use an exterior paint. Either way, using a finish with slightly more sheen (as opposed to flat paint) will make it easier to clean any scuffs from the walls. Overall, we’re super pleased with how the walls turned out and are definitely glad we paid someone to finish the drywall so we could focus on painting and keeping the project moving quickly. Including drywall finishing in our garage makeover really made a big impact on how it looks. Stay tuned for our cabinet install!
If you missed the first post in this series, check it out!
