Context: Renovating my house and would like all walls to have a "Smooth" finish.
Questions:
Any advice to create smooth surfaces are welcome.
If you are very good with large trowel, you can apply a thin layer of mud over it. Then gently sand it to make it perfectly flat.
Alternatively just sand with 80 grid to remove the orange peel effect and the old paint. Followed by fine grid for smother surface. That would create a lots of dust so use sander with vacuum hose attachment.
Depending on how deep the orange peel is, I would partially power sand it down with 40-80 grit, then skim with all purpose and sand smooth. This is a lot of work however, I'm going to guess its going to cost as much or more than the original tape job cost on the house if you hire it done.
One issue with mud over paint is that paint does not absorb the micro bubbles in the mud like unpainted drywall, so it is probably going to take at least 3 passes to get these filled in.
Definitely don't plan on Semi-gloss paint on top of this.
I just did a 12x12 room. It had terrible orange peel over previous wallpaper. Someone didn't prep it well and I ended up peeling off quite a bit of it. Not a single flat spot in whole room.
I'm a bit embarrassed to say I used close to 20 gallons of mud to finally get it flat. New inside and outside corners to straighten things up. Now that was a lot of work! But I'm pretty satisfied with this last sand and sprayed on primer. This was days of work.
