As I've been noting up and down these forums, I've got to quickly turn this fixer-upper that I've been working on for years into something to sell. This means that I'm having to finish-up some projects that I have underway, hire contractors to do others and in this case, I have an experienced guy doing the bulk of the work and I possibly might come around behind him to do the finishing touches. The experienced guy is laminating my ceilings with sheetrock. He seemed kind of surprised that I wanted him to run tape around the edges, so there'd be an unbroken connection to the walls. Theoretically, I could go behind him and put molding over this tape, but my initial plan was to shoot the ceilings with one pattern using my hopper gun and the walls with another. My hopper gun is still in the box. I've never gotten around to using it and it sounds like my sheetrock guy has always used some kind of patterned stick that he turns to keep from repeating the same pattern. He may actually have a hopper of his own, but he seems to really like the patterned stick method and might not know a lot about the Marshalltown SprayMate. Nevertheless, I'm willing to hop my own to save money or let him use my hopper to save time, if my impression that it's more efficient than a patterned stick holds true. Anyway... after that long preamble... There are place on my walls, where the previous owners obviously patched something by spreading a little joint compound over the plaster and we started by scraping some of the kinda ugly spots and a few new ones, then "buttering" with a smooth coat of joint compound. 1) Is this necessary or will the bare spots get sufficiently covered by the hopper? Also, should I actually clean the walls before he "butters", if that's the way to go? 2) I probably could find this answer, but since I'm here and if you don't mind... Do you apply primer (Kilz?) before hitting it with the hopper, after, or both? 3) Right now, my walls have a "knockdown" pattern and my plan has been to just go back over all of the repaired walls with another coating of "knockdown"; Part of me kind of likes "orange peel", but I don't want to have to sand every wall, so does anyone think an "orange peel" could go over "knockdown" and still look good? Am I wrong to think that a "knockdown" can go over "knockdown"? 4) And finally, the guy putting up my drywall seemed surprised that I didn't have a problem with shooting all the walls and his attitude made me think that it might be more work than I had anticipated. Again, I don't know his experience with hoppers, but am I wrong in thinking that it'd be relatively easy and pretty cost-effective to just go over everything, balance the patterns and hide all the flaws? Thanks in Advance PS) If anyone has any good pointers toward info that'll cover this and other questions, please point the way.

We have a 30+- year old split foyer. Well, the interior wall is coming away from the ceiling. Our home is extremely dry and NEVER gets water. In fact it has a sump pump that is never plugged in and never gets any water. I am stuck and do not know what to do and fix the situation. It was just at one end of the home for a while, and then we put our aquarium upstairs, and now it is on that end of the wall. where I can see the cracks, they look as if they may be about a quarter of an inch, an the rest is pretty much the tape pulling down as the wall is sinking or the ceiling is rising, which ever is happening. I just want our home back to normal. The damage that has been done already looks like something I cant patch up (Never done drywall). Thanks:wall: