May 27 2008
Texture
FH and I decided to paint some walls in our new home. We have a media nook, or a nook in which we decided to place the entertainment center because of the convenient location of the cable outlet. This nook has the same wall treatment as the rest of the house - textured walls with flat, builder off-white paint. We decided that the nook needed something so that the entertainment center, as large as it is, wouldn’t look lost or out of place. We went for black. The entertainment armoire is black, as are the electronics and even the CD racks, so this color choice made sense to us. And as soon as I get a new battery for my little point and shoot camera, I’ll show you all how awesome it looks.
As we were preparing the area to paint, a discussion about the wall texture came up. Where I come from, walls are smooth. Here, walls are textured. FH said that in California, only old homes have smooth walls. Back east, we don’t bother much with the spray and knockdown texture stuff, and most people who know their way around a hardware store know how to patch a hole in drywall so that it comes out smooth. This texture stuff is new to me.
I asked FH why the walls are all textured out west, and he told me that it’s so that no one will notice that the walls aren’t straight. So am I correct in assuming that it’s easier to teach someone to spray some texture and float it out than it is to teach them to use a level? This West Coast stuff is too much for me to take sometimes. East Coasters, when people tell you that California is like another planet, trust me. It is. And although I’m in Nevada, about 25% of the people moving here are from Orange and LA counties alone - just two counties out of 58 in CA. That means that they bring their interplanetary weirdness with them when they move here. FH is from California, but the northern part. It’s a bit more normal up there, but they still have textured walls.





