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Handling Touch Up Jobs

15 October, 2021

What is your best touch-up advice? 

 

Cindy Howard
Cindy Howard, Decorative and Faux Finishes, Sugar Land, Texas 

 

First thing is we tell our clients that there are two possibilities: We can do a spot fix, but if it’s not satisfactory, we would have to go corner to corner, which is more of a sure thing. With a spot repair, you can get a halo that appears around the repair. We try to find out the history of the wall whenever possible. There are a lot of factors that you have to consider to make sure you’re spot on. 

Most of the time, we’re fixing somebody else’s problem. You’re looking under light covers on the ceiling trying to find an original color, or you have to do some history and figure out how this whole thing started. We did one that was corner to corner, and we definitely used different products and different colors because they had absolutely zero idea of what was used originally. 

 

Decorative Touchup
“This stenciled ceiling had some water damage, so we had to match it back to the original
finish,” said Cindy Howard. “We initially did it with a single-use adhesive stencil. You can’t
really have a stencil made like that again; it’s not going to be exactly right. We ended up
hand-painting everything to match, so it was a lot of measuring. Since we just completed
the job recently, we knew what products to put on it. When it’s not our own job, it’s
much trickier.”


We had to take it down to what do we really think they started with, and what consistency was the texture? We had to figure out how to replicate that and find out the color and sheen of what they started with, because since everything shows on walls and ceilings, getting the texture and the sheen and all that right is so important. 

I feel bad for the clients where people come in and say that their finish is never done anymore, and they have to redo the whole room. They love their finish. Everything in the room has been purchased because of this finish, and they’re not ready for the commitment to the change. It’s a relief for the clients to get these touch-ups and repairs done without changing so much of their home environment that they’re incredibly comfortable with. 


 

More from Cindy Howard

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