bad wall texture job

You get what you pay for.....I've always preached it and now I'm falling victim to my own warning. I paid someone to finish my basement, and they did a decent job through the framing, rough-ins, and hanging the drywall. But then my guy's idea of quality really started to show. I had asked for a wall texture to match my upstairs (which I consider a knock-down orange peel). What I got instead was a messy version....he just shot mud on kinda randomly with no knock-down/troweling process. It doesn't look horrible, but it's enough to bother me.

So I wasn't man enough to pull the plug on the operation right after he applied the texture. I let him finish the job thinking that maybe after a few coats of paint things would look better. Turns out his painting skills are about as good as his mudding skills.

What's my best option for cleaning this up now? I've been reading and I think that maybe a coat of Gardz, followed by some sanding, followed by a complete skim coat and then paint might be a good option. But I'm not sure how this will work over the existing texture. Any advice from the pros would be very helpful.

By the way, I luckily asked for a plaster ceiling and he sub'd that out to someone who did a good job.

 

Welcome to the forums!

I doubt you need to prime before skim coating or retexture. What type of paint is on the wall? flat or gloss?

I'm not sure what you mean by a knockdown orange peel
Knock down is a different texture than orange peel. Could you supply a pic of the texture you want matched and what you have in the basement? use a free service like Image hosting, free photo sharing & video sharing at Photobucket

Sanding and then a skim coat is possibly your best bet. Sometimes you can sand and then retexture to hide some bad texture work but it would be hard to say, sight unseen.