Hanging board is carpentry; finishing it is the craft — and in Duluth the craft gets audited daily by low-angle northern light that rakes across walls for half the year. Seams, ridges, and lazy sanding have nowhere to hide at this latitude. Duluth Drywall finishes drywall across the Twin Ports: board we hung, board your builder hung, or board you hung yourself — plus the skim coating that brings century-home walls back to smooth.
Our Finishing Services
- Taping & mudding new board — the full three-coat sequence: tape coat, fill coat, finish coat, each sanded and feathered wider than the last.
- Finishing DIY and builder-hung board — hanging is a fair weekend project; invisible finishing is not. Stopping at “hung” and calling us is the smart version of DIY.
- Level 5 skim coats — a thin coat over the entire surface for dead-flat walls that survive raking light and dark paint.
- Skim coating old plaster — the signature Duluth transformation: crazed, patched, wallpaper-scarred plaster coated back to one smooth plane, character intact.
- Texture application & matching — sprayed and hand textures applied evenly, and matched wherever a repair or remodel meets an existing surface.
Finish Levels, Translated
- Level 3 — a base for heavy texture only; never paint-ready.
- Level 4 — the standard residential finish: seams and fasteners coated three times and sanded. Right for most rooms in flat or eggshell paint.
- Level 5 — everything in Level 4 plus a full-surface skim coat. The finish for raking light and saturated colors — which, given our sun angles, means more Duluth rooms qualify than you'd think.
A quote that doesn't name a level is quoting the fastest one. We specify room by room, and we'll steer you away from paying for Level 5 anywhere Level 4 would look identical.
The Century-Home Skim Coat
Most of our finishing work happens on walls older than drywall itself. Decades of paint layers, patched cracks, wallpaper glue, and previous owners' experiments leave plaster in Lakeside, the Hillside, and West Duluth looking exhausted even when it's structurally sound. A professional skim coat is the middle path between living with it and gutting it: repair what's failed, coat the walls whole, sand, and prime — original mass and soundproofing kept, modern smoothness gained, at a fraction of replacement cost. It's the single most transformative project in an old Duluth house.
Cold-Room Honesty
Joint compound cures by evaporation, and a 55-degree basement or a shoulder-season room without heat cures it slowly. We schedule coats around real conditions — and we'd rather quote you four days than promise two and leave ridges. Dust gets the same discipline: masking, sealed containment, vacuum-assisted sanding where the job allows, cleanup daily.
Get a Free Finishing Estimate
New board to tape, plaster to skim, or a texture to match — call (218) 752-2200 or send the details for a free written estimate. Need installation or repairs too? Same crew, same estimate.