I have a house with drywall but someone has used that texture paint to try to make it look like plaster. Is there an easy way to get this stuff off? Thanks

 

You could always try to use a spray bottle with warm water and moisten an inconspicuous area and see how the water reacts to the paint. It may soften it up enough so that you can use a scraper to slowly scrape the paint off the walls. That may be the easiest step to try first if you haven't given that a shot yet.

Looking up other techniques on how to remove textured paint returned a lot of labor intensive and messy steps. The techniques are applying a skim coat of drywall mud, sanding the paint, or (gulp) removing the paper layer of the drywall (which I cannot even believe is a recommendation as it removes what gives drywall much of its structural integrity).

Another option, depending on how much experience you have, is to put up a 1/4 inch layer of new drywall over the existing textured wall. You'd want to remove baseboards if you went this route and you'd also want to verify that you could remove door casings and put them back on without creating a large gap between the door frame and the casing. Or you could just run the 1/4 inch drywall up to the door casing and lose 1/4 inch of width.

 

I doubt moisture will soften/remove the texture paint but it's worth a try.

IMO the best method would be to skim coat the wall.

 

Thanks for the replies. I am going to have to replace some of the drywall so I will either need to get the texture off or be able to replicate it on the new parts.

 

I doubt you'll be able to remove a paint texture. It shouldn't be that difficult to apply a thin skim coat over it to smooth it out. If you want to replicate the texture we should be able to help but a pic showing the texture would be helpful.

 

Skim coat is my first thought, replace is my next. The fact that it's paint makes removal of just the texture very difficult.

 

As a Real Estate Broker, I can say that textured paint is usually associated with some underlying irregularity that is being hidden.

When you succeed in removing it, you may know why they originally chose to apply it.