Just purchased a 1986 manufactured home in excellent condition. My debate is prime wallboard and re-texture, then paint..or can I prime them and just apply paint over primer? Wallboard is in excellent shape no scratches etc.Also is there a product anyone really likes for re-texturing?

Very bad idea to texture any wall or ceiling.
Look around on any of the hundreds of DIY site on the net and everyone of them has a ton of people asking how to get it off and none asking how to put it on.
Just about impossible to clean and a royal pain to pain.
If your going to paint, all the walls will need to be cleaned, light sanding, wiped down again, bonding primer, then acrilic latex paint.
Skip a step and it may or may not stay stuck to the wall.

Mature Fixer Upper:

You keep saying "re-texturing", and so I'm presuming you already have texture on your walls.

If that texture is already painted, and is reasonably clean, you can just paint over it with a thick nap roller. (You should sand down a semi-gloss or gloss paint before repainting with the same kind of paint, (latex or oil), but I can't imagine how a person would sand down textured walls or ceilngs? Hopefully, it's a mute point because you don't have semigloss or gloss paint on your walls or ceilings.)

If it's bare texture that's never been primed, then I'd prime with a thick nap roller, allow time to dry, and paint with a thick nap roller. But, before I did that, I'd get that texture damp by misting it with a spray bottle, and seeing how soft it get and how easy it is to scrape off your walls or ceilings.

In my humble opinion, the best way to texture is not to texture at all. The reason why so many new homes have textured walls or ceilings is NOT because people like texture, or that it's fashionable, or that it spreads like evenly throughout a room. It's because texture hides drywall problems, so the builder gets fewer complaints from the people that buy his homes. That is, he's texturing all the walls and ceilings so that he can pay his drywalling crew less to do a lesser quality job. That results in hassles for you from now on because it's just plain hard to match texture when (not if) you need to do any drywall repairs. In order to match texture, you need to know how it was done, and you also need to mix your texture to the same consistancy as the original stuff was when it was applied.

Flat is beautiful. Flat plaster or drywall is easier to repair, easier to paint and easier to clean. The problem is that with ceiling mounted light fixtures and windows coming to within a few inches of the ceiling, the light hits the ceiling drywall or plaster at a sharp angle, turning every little glitch into a canyon or a mountain range. Texture "fixes" that problem by making the whole ceiling into an assemblage of canyons and mountain ranges. Better, in my view, for the plasterers or drywalls to do a better job in the first place, so there are no glitches that need to be hidden with texture.

Most people that have textured walls and ceilings are looking for a way to remove the texture from those walls or ceilings.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Nestor,

Okay,I phrased that all wrong. I have a kitchen and 2 bathrooms that have very ugly original wallboard with hideous wallpaper glued to them. I know the wallboard consists of luan with the vinyl wallpaper glued to it.My original idea was to put a sealer on it, then a very light coat of orange peal texture, then primer, and paint it. I have vaulted ceilings that are already textured with beams so was trying to match the rest of the decor in the manufactured home. Am worried if i sealed, primed and painted it would look cheap?

Well it is what it is. To me yes painted paneling does look like painted paneling but, adding texture to walls in a mobil home would not be the way to go in my opion.
Mobil homes tend to flex due to the way there made and supported under the home. So there a very real chance any applyed texture may start to crack and fall off. Then what? Once done there's no going back.
I've lived in several mobil homes, you just have to work around the limitations.
If you Google "faux painting" there's hundreds of differant ways of painting walls to look like stone, leather, cloth, ECT with paints and glazes.

Plus, don't you have the strips every 4 feet. I think orange peel is going to look horrible with the strips. Just paint.