Twelve years ago we painted our living room, entry, and dining room with Ralph Lauren's River Rock paint. It has a very fine granules which give the walls a fine sandpaper texture that is really wonderful. I have found the surface easy to clean with a magic eraser (sponge) and when necessary I've done the occasional small touch-up with a jar of the leftover paints that I store under my bathroom sink. I did a quick check online to see if these paints are still available and discovered they are, but also found a lot of threads with folks complaining how difficult it was to use this paint. I do recall it looked blotchy with the first coat, but looked fine after the second coat, so we really didn't have any problems. (We used a very deep taupe for the living room and a soft dove for the entry and dining room and both worked equally well for us.) I wouldn't recommend Ralph Lauren Suede, which is similar in texture. We tried that for our den and later discovered every time we brushed against the walls it left a white mark and any attempt at touch-ups simply wouldn't blend in properly. For some reason the River Rock doesn't have this problem. (We ended up repainting that room six months later with an ICI Dulux paint that was fabulous - nice, thick and rich in pigment - could almost get away with just one coat even in their deepest colors, including red and navy!)

Why is GW suddenly green? Or is it just my eyes? Hmmm... Sorry you don't feel well. Hope you get over it soon!! My parents bought a 1 yr old house when I was in the womb, then when I was 9, they built another. Sooo...I've pretty much always lived in new houses, haven't I?? Never even thought of that. I'm sure your parents thought they were doing a wonderful job when they were putting up that blue paneling! Gosh, I can honestly see that crud now. My in-laws have the white in their enclosed porch. We had a little of the brown in the kitchen, and a butt-load in the basement. It's all been removed, of course. Here I mean...in-laws still have theirs...lol. Some day I'm gonna have to get a picture in the kitchen and show you where the paneling was. It covered a hole, the hole was in the back of the built-in china cabinet in the dining room. My carpenter made a pretty cool door for it, out of an old original beat up door we found in the basement. Easy to describe, but takes me a lot of words, being as wordy as I am....descriptive I mean. You know what I mean Nineteen. ;-> That wall looks good, from what I can tell!! There's some really good masks, can't remember what they're called, but you can wear that when you're working on the chipped plaster, if you're really worried about it. Me? I rely heavily on the ignorance is bliss aspect of life...lol...just kidding. Long sleeves, pants, whatever you feel is necessary while working in those areas. Like I said, I had wallpaper, with some paint over the wallpaper, it all got the steamer. The foyer, up the stairs, the alcove, down the hallway and in the back area had one kind of wallpaper on the bottom, another on the top, with a border in the middle. Yack. Man was it hard to remove. Took me forever and a day. I found just one coat of white paint under, with a blue line, the line where the top went to and the bottom went. Let's not measure, let's use blue paint. Again, yack. I also had just scratch coats under that paint and nothing but the scratch coat in the parlor. But I used the NuWal, so it doesn't show. The sellers? There were times when the husband had to stop by here, and I'd ask where his wife was....she's out in the car, she loved this house tooooooooooo much!!!!!!!!! She can't stand the thought of anyone doing anything to it!!!!!!!!! eeeegaaads!! Did she have eyes?? We had a PLASTIC chandelier in the dining room! She couldn't stand the thought of me replacing that? And some of the plastic "crystals" were hanging by paper clips!!! I kid you not. The carpet in here, must have been at least 25 yrs old and wasn't showing it's age well.....she couldn't stand the thought of us pulling up the carpet to show the beautiful maple hardwoods?? Was she crazy?? me thinks so....oy.

I finished yesterday, before reading your post. Although wet-sanding IS what I did at the edges. My mistake: I didn't sacrifice (i.e. mud/skim) far enough outside of the patch line. I tried to feather it about only 1-1.5" inches from the tape -- and that caused too much of a "raised border" look that became more visible once painted. The last two times I feathered it far out, it blended well, but my knockdown-from-a-bottle looked awful. So this time I was trying to limit the area I needed to apply it (i.e. not ruin any existing knockdown). However, I didn't go far enough out and caused the raised border: what do you know? My knockdown this time looked excellent inside the patched area -- just the improper feathering looked amateurish. Not easy to make it match.... Maybe the 4th repair will be perfect! And maybe someone else will find this helpful. Thanks for the reply.

I haven't used the Polar Bear, but if you want to hide imperfections maybe you could cover the wall with a fabric or heavy paper wall covering.