About Actionfigurejunkies

A Shop That Argues About Finish Levels

Actionfigurejunkies hangs, tapes and finishes drywall across Riverside. We are based near Victoria Ave in the 92509 area and we work the city, Rubidoux, Jurupa Valley and the neighborhoods either side of the 91.

The thing we care about more than most is the finish level. It is the part of a drywall quote that almost never gets explained to a homeowner, and it is the part that decides whether the wall looks right in two years or looks like a map of its own joints.

The Short Version

Level 4 is the ordinary correct finish for a painted interior wall. Joints and corners taped and coated, fastener heads coated, everything sanded flat. Level 5 takes that same finished wall and adds a thin skim of compound across the whole face, so the paper and the compound take paint the same way.

Level 5 is not better in the abstract. It is better for a specific set of conditions: flat unbroken walls, raking light, and any paint with a sheen to it. Outside those conditions it is an expensive coat of mud nobody will ever see.

Why It Comes Up So Often Here

Riverside builds a lot of west facing rooms with big flat walls, and the inland afternoon sun comes in low and hard for most of the year. That is exactly the light that finds a joint. A wall that would look perfect in a north facing room in a cooler climate can look ribbed and patchy here on the same specification.

We have been called out plenty of times to look at a paint job somebody is unhappy with, and found a competently finished level 4 wall under an eggshell paint in a room that needed a skim. Nobody did anything wrong. The level was chosen without anyone standing in the room at four in the afternoon.

How We Work

We walk the job, we look at the light, we ask what paint and what sheen, and then we tell you which level we would specify and what the difference costs. If the answer is that your textured tract house walls need level 4 and nothing more, that is what we will say, and we will not sell you the skim.

Repairs get the same care in a different direction. Matching an existing knockdown or orange peel texture means shooting a sample board and holding it against the wall in the room’s own light before anything gets sprayed on the ceiling.

What We Will Not Do

We will not spray texture over a repair without matching it first. We will not put standard board on a garage firewall where Type X belongs. And on any house from before the early eighties we will not scrape a popcorn ceiling until it has been tested, because that question has one right answer and it is not a guess.

Call (951) 219-6582.