When we first looked at the house, we knew the popcorn ceilings had to go. What we didn’t know, was what we would find underneath! Below is a photo of the living room when we bought the house, before removing the carpets and popcorn ceiling.
Before I get into the nitty gritty of popcorn ceiling removal, I have to add a serious warning. If your house was built before 1985, there is a good chance that you could have asbestos in your house. Common places to find asbestos are in popcorn ceilings and vinyl or laminate flooring. Even though the use of asbestos was banned by 1980 in the U.S., companies were still selling products containing asbestos that they had in stock for years after. With that being said, even if your house was built in the early 80’s, it’s still good to have everything tested for asbestos. You can have a specialist come out and take samples from your popcorn ceilings, walls and flooring and have it tested. Better safe than sorry!
Asbestos removal is VERY DANGEROUS and should be removed by professional asbestos abatement companies. This is NOT something you should do yourself and if you do, it can cause serious health issues that can ultimately be deadly. I am NOT recommending that you remove popcorn ceilings containing asbestos yourself. Please don’t do this!
Ok! Now that we’ve got the scary stuff out of the way, let’s talk about how to remove popcorn ceilings. As with many DIY projects, the prep is a large part of the work. We laid down plastic sheeting over all the floors and taped the edges up the sides of the walls and taped all of these seams on the floor together.
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You’ll want to wear proper PPE to protect yourself (asbestos or not). We wore full Tyvek suits that cover your shoes and have a hood. We wore disposable latex gloves, respirator masks and goggles. Basically we had no skin showing and all disposable outerwear was thrown away after one use and all clothing underneath was washed immediately after. Each day we wore fresh Tyvek suits and gloves.
Once we were suited up and we had the house prepped, it was time to get to work! But not before we filmed a funny reel with a bucket of popcorn, of course. Because if you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong. And if there’s one thing my brother knows how to do, it’s have fun!
Alright, now it’s actually time to get down to business! We used a sprayer with water and a bit of dish soap to soak the ceilings first. The biggest risk of asbestos is airborne dust particles that are harmful if inhaled, so if you keep everything wet, it minimizes dust and it also scrapes off way easier. Once everything is sprayed, we let it soak in for about 10-15 minutes, then sprayed again before starting to scrape. It sounded like a rain forest inside the house! The entire ceiling was dripping wet onto the plastic on the floor and it was a strange feeling of rain falling indoors.
We bought these popcorn ceiling scrapers, but to be honest, they were pretty flimsy and didn’t work great. What we found worked best was this taping knife. Once everything was soaked through, the popcorn ceiling scraped off in large, satisfying chunks.
We had a good system down eventually! I sprayed in front of Damien and he would follow behind and scrape. Instead of using the extension pole, he just got up on a ladder which gave him better leverage.
Everything we scraped off landed on the plastic wrap covering the floor and when we were done, we simply rolled up the plastic, taped it closed with duct tape and it went straight into the dumpster to be properly disposed of. Basically you want it to be sealed up tight so that everything in it it is contained.
We had to be really careful not to gauge the ceiling because what we didn’t know initially was that the entire house has radiant heat in the ceiling! The heating wires were in the drywall in the ceilings and the popcorn was sprayed on top of that.
Our plan after scraping the popcorn off, was to skim coat the ceilings with fresh drywall mud, prime and then paint. We couldn’t remove the drywall because of the radiant heating elements (which still work really well actually).
So now that the carpets are out, the popcorn is scraped, the next step will be to skim coat and get ready for paint. Or so we thought! We didn’t know it, but we were in for another big surprise! I’ll share what happened next week!
Until then, happy DIY-ing!
-Selene Builds Things
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