Mud is a perfect material for art and architecture; it’s durable, beautiful and easy to work with. Earth is used by many cultures for building — in fact, it’s the most common construction material on ...

Q:I live in a home built in 1979 and want to create a smoother surface on my walls. They were finished with a textured finish of long strokes of finishing mud, which I have heard called a skip-trough ...

Check the size of your 1/2-in. plywood backing board. Then, cut the fiberglass window screen to be eight inches larger than it in both directions (so there are four inches of overhang on each side).

Q:My husband and I just bought a house that has a "skip-trough" finish on the interior walls. We would like to make the walls smooth and then repaint them. One friend advised us to apply joint ...

DEAR DESIGNER: We recently moved into an old house. One of the bedrooms has fancy plasterwork on the walls that is dated and busy. What can I do to hide it? Tearing down the wall is not an option at ...