Removing popcorn ceiling...

If you own a home that was built in the 70/80's, chances are you've had popcorn ceilings in your house. I remember growing up with popcorn ceiling and when a ball was thrown against it white particles would fall to the carpet. It was hard to deny that you were throwing a ball in the house with such evidence!

Fortunately, someone has already gone through the process of removing the popcorn in our current home in our main living areas. However, the bedrooms, playroom and den still have the popcorn. We looked at having it removed when we first moved in because I dislike it that much, but we decided to spend that money in other areas. When we opened up the wall to the office we had to cut several holes in the ceiling to reroute the electrical. This made a patch job a little difficult. The electrician said, "Screw the drywall pieces back in and then just wait until you scrape the ceiling and then make your patch job. You are scraping this ceiling aren't you?" It hadn't crossed my mind until that point, but you better believe I took the opportunity with all the furniture out of the room and the floors ripped out to get rid of the popcorn.

I used an 8in drywall knife and a squirt bottle. I would spray down an area until it was good and wet and then I would scrape. With the majority of the popcorn off, I would then spray just a little more and scrape off the remaining residue, and then moved on to another section. This totally sucked. Not because it was really hard, but because it took all of the little upper body strength I have to complete it. After I had completed an 1/8 of the room, my hand was numb from squirting the ceiling. I went to the garage and grabbed the pump style weed sprayer, filled it up with water and with caution started spraying the ceiling. This made a world of difference. I had to be a little more careful as to how much water was being sprayed but I started to regain the feeling in my hand from the little hand-held sprayer. It went much faster this way. And three days later (just working on it a little bit each night after the kids went to bed) we had a completely fantastic mess! Of course once you get the popcorn off then you have to sand and repair the ceiling, sand again, clean the residue, prime, paint... What was once a simple idea to just quickly remove the popcorn because the room was already torn apart became so much more. The story of my life!

I definitely need the phrase "If you give a mouse a cookie..." displayed prominently in my home.