Michael Holigan: If you'd like to add richness and depth to some of the rooms in your home, we've got some specialists here to help us out today. We're back with Randy Kalis. It's good to have you back Randy.
Randy Kalis: Great to be back, great to be back.
M.H.: Randy, tell me about this room. This is definitely not your typical white room.
R.K.: Absolutely. This is an older home with a real aged beauty to it. But many of the new homes I work in, this is the look that we want to achieve.
M.H.: Okay. Well, with this room, even though it looks old, it is not really old. This is some new finish on there, isn't it?
R.K.: Absolutely. This is a number of glazes. We have a texture on the ceiling but I wanted and aged glaze look on the walls. I have a wonderful artist that I work with. Her name is Penny Sanders, and she creates this with me. I can give her much input, with the client, of colors and looks that I would like, but the true artist that she is will come through different glazes to give it a true aged look.
M.H.: Well, I know Penny's here. Let's see exactly how she did it.
Penny Sanders: We wanted to give it an old European feel, so we textured the walls first, and painted them. And then continued to take on our project up above, and bring some of the outside in. I went to books and resources that we have, and I made my pattern, and got the whole thing drawn and blown up, only to discover the arches were a little bit different.
M.H.: That's unbelievable. You mean a home builder didn't build the exact same size doorways.
P.S.: Most of the time, if we measure everything, there's hardly a shelf in our house that is exactly the same.
M.H.: Shh, that's a home builder's secret. Don't say that.
P.S.: But that's what makes it fun, are the challenges.
M.H.: So how did you get the pattern up there if they're not the same?
P.S.: We took our pattern, we cut it into about ten pieces so we could paste it up there and adjust with each little movement. So visually they all look the same.
M.H.: The whole wall has depth. It's like you have chips missing out of it to give it that aged look. How did you do that?
P.S.: We chipped it.
M.H.: Oh, really.
P.S.: First of all we painted different colors and let them then cure. And then we took chisels and screwdrivers and anything you could find at the time and chipped off and sanded. We also used a little bit of paint stripper. Through about a months time we got a look of a fresco that many times takes hundred's of years.
M.H.: Can you take me through the process itself. Can you actually show me how to age a wall?
P.S.: I certainly can show you part of it. I'm just taking some drywall compound, some mud, and put it on with a trowel any way you like. Just play with this mud. If part of it gets too heavy you can easily come back and sand it off. It's a real flexible texture. And if you'll do that then you'll get just the bones for an old Italian or French Wall. Now the trick to using glazes is that you want to use a paint that is either an eggshell or a semigloss, so it has a little bit of slip to it.
M.H.: What is slip?
P.S.: Slip is the surface that makes your glaze move a little better, and when you screw up it pulls it off easier for you. And remember, you need to give yourself plenty of room for screw ups because that's part of the fun of it. If you have to do it right the first time, it's just too hard and it makes you crazy.
M.H.: Okay.
P.S.: I'm using an oil based glaze that has some umber colorant in it. Umber's a great dirt color. I call it expensive dirt. I'm going to put it on heavily and then I'm going to take it off with some cheesecloth or rags.
M.H.: And you don't have to wait very long?
P.S.: No. When you're doing a whole wall, it really needs to be done with a friend or a couple of them, because it dries so quickly it's a lot easier if you just call in a friend and you can get one wall done at a time.
M.H.: Corner to corner.
P.S.: Corner to corner.
Episode 012 1995 - 96 Season
| Heating and AC | Fireplace Checkup | Faux Walls | Cleaning Gutters | Backyard Putting Green | Bi Weekly Mortgage Payments |LIST |
To order a Video Tape, call 1-800-TO-BUILD and ask for Episode #012.