We just finished the sheetrock job. We had removed the little small pantry and that mean, we had to repair one wall. We closed off an opening between the dining room and the kitchen with framing. And then we also did some rewiring in the kitchen. This is one of those jobs that is essential before we installed the rest of the cabinets, put in new flooring and finished the painting.
 Let me begin by saying that while we installed the sheetrock ourselves, we had a professional do the taping, mudding and sanding. This is money well spent at about $500 (It took about 4 trips for the guy to get the walls just right) and neither one of us are experienced in this area. I thought about trying to find some way to shield the area from the rest of the house so I could limit the dust that would fly, but this job was in the great room and there were three walls involved with a twelve foot height. At the time, I thought there might be no way to prevent dust from getting everywhere, but now that I’m knee deep in cleaning up from that job, I’m thinking I could have tried to find a better way. I will have dust for weeks to clean up starting with the electronics and working to the kitchen. Also, even after I clean one area, you come back a week later and still find dust settling.  This is an area where a little time spent preparing for the job would have made a big difference with the cleanup afterwards.
The other thing I had to worry about was the texture on the wall. In general, the walls were lightly textured when the house was built. If you look at the picture below in the article on wine glass storage you can see the degree of texture on the wall.  I prefer smooth walls and the guy who did the drywall did the walls, but he just sprayed with drywall primer.  I don’t have any experience doing texture and acquiring the texture tools is a large investment for such a small space. I was able to address this problem by buying a texturizer 9 inch roller. I bought my roller at Home Depot for about $8. Here’s a site that has pictures of what a Goop Loop roller looks like. Using Primer, I used the roller over the non-textured areas. I was suprised by how well this roller mimic’d the texture. And in fact, key to success in this area is that lighter is better. If you miss a spot or find that your texture is too lightly applied, you can always wait till it dries and go back over it. For those areas that were too small for the roller, you can mimic the technique with a small brush. Here’s a great reference for how to achieve this effect with a brush.