Remove Texture from Acoustic Ceiling Surfaces

A step-by-step guide to scraping that unsightly "cottage cheese" texture, also called Popcorn texture, off of perfectly decent ceilings and improving the appearance of your home! There has been some discussion about what "Cottage cheese" or popcorn texture is. There are mainly 2 kinds of texture on the market today that you will see in homes.

  1. Popcorn texture is the texture you'll find mostly in houses built around 1980 or earlier. It is sold in dry bags and when mixed up it has the look of runny cottage cheese, when it is sprayed on a ceiling it has a really lumpy, flaky texture and you can usually break off pieces relatively easily.
  2. The second kind of texture you will see in most of the newer homes now is called "Span-tex", it comes in boxes from your hardware store and although I do believe it claims it is ready made you will probably have to thin it down a little. When applied, depending on the finishing of the texture, thickness, etc. It should be fairly hard and have the consistency as if someone took some mud and sprayed it against a wall (essentially that's what they did), and it won't have the larger defined chunks as the popcorn texture does.
  • This article doesn't explain the procedure to remove a Span-tex texture as it is a different product it will not just scrape off.

Steps

  1. Determine if your texture contains asbestos- you can get a test kit for that.
  2. Take your furniture out of the house if possible (having the furniture there makes a huge mess.) We covered all of our floors with the rolls of plastic that you can get cheap at Home Depot. Once done, just roll it up and throw it away.
  3. Determine if the ceiling texture has been painted over. This makes it a lot harder to scrape off. If it hasn’t, you only have to wet it lightly and it comes off like butter. If it has, you have to spray it heavily (we used our hose with a sprayer attachment) and soak it in order for it to come off. If you take a hand or pole sander with a really heavy grit sandpaper and quickly run over the ceiling before wetting it down it allows the water to penetrate into the texture a little better, making it come off easier.
  4. Definitely wear masks when you are scraping. That stuff is nasty. We did the actual scraping with a few different tools. We used the widest hand trowels that we could find (metal work best). We also used flat headed shovels! They worked great because you didn’t need a ladder, the long handle was built in! On tough areas a ladder (scaffolding is safer) raises you so that you can get a better angle and clean more off quickly. There is also a tool that allows you to hook up a plastic bag for easy disposal and less debris on the ground.
  5. Be really careful when scraping so that you don’t rip into or scrape the drywall. You have to use a pretty light touch and try to keep the edge level so that one end doesn’t dip into the drywall.
  6. Scrape as much as you can off.Any little chunk will show through the texture.
  7. Once it is all scraped off, use dry wall patch to even out areas or repair where you ripped through the drywall (I had a lot of those spots!). Roll up the plastic with the chunks on it and toss it. Cover the floors with clean plastic again,just to protect floor.
  8. You will want to sand the entire ceiling after you patch.
  9. You can either do the retexturing yourself or hire someone to do it. We did it ourselves with an airless gun and texture that you can buy at Home Depot. It looks like bags of concrete. Be careful not to buy the popcorn stuff again, we did that! We mixed it up and thought, "Hmm… this looks really chunky"?, and had to take it back! So, we sprayed the texture on with the gun and then knocked it down to match the texture on the walls with a trowel. It turned out pretty good. My friends hired someone to do their retexturing after they scraped.
  10. Paint all the ceilings with "primer/ sealer"?.
  11. Paint it all over again with plain white ceiling paint (which is really cheap).
  12. All in all, it is very worth it. You'll need at least 4 people tackle the task. A good estimate of time it should take to accomplish this is 5-6 days. (You can do all the scraping in one or two days, the retexturing in one day, the priming in one day, and the painting in another.)

Tips

  • Hand scraping can be done without covering the entire room in plastic with a small spray bottle with water in it, a plastic or metal scraper, and a 24-can cardboard "flat" (find them at the liquor store or grocery) that has a duct-tape "handle" on the underside, this lets you slip your hand under the flat but keeps the flat from falling if you shift your hand. Simply spray lightly with the bottle, wait a few minutes, scrape into the flat, repeat. Works great for small rooms or odd sections of a room that you cannot easily cover in plastic.
  • Use a plastic hand trowel- it won't mark up the drywall as much as metal will.
  • Alternatively, take a 6" joint knife but first use a grinder to round the edges to prevent damaging (gouging) the ceiling drywall. Have a spray bottle filled with warm water. Spray a workable area and wait a few minutes. Then take a cardboard box cover (1 or 1 1/2 inch lip) and simply scrape the cottage cheese texture off into the box cover. When the cover is suitably full, dump the stuff into a garbage back. Work your way around the room this way so it creates no dust to breathe in and very little of it dropping to the floor. This method is clean, fast and easy.
  • Scrape the gunk onto a plastic tarp,or if you are getting rid of old carpet- scrape right on to that, roll up and take away!
  • If your ceiling has been painted over, give it a quick sand with a pole sander and a rough grit sandpaper then use a spray bottle full of water or a NEW garden liquid pump, like you might use for weed killer, and mist down the ceiling

Warnings

  • Ceiling surfaces are finished with texture to conceal faults. By removing the texture you may reveal imperfections that are worse than the "cottage cheese" appearance.
  • Be sure to use an asbestos testing kit before you scrape the ceiling yourself. There can be scary side effects if your home has asbestos in the ceiling acoustic. Asbestos exposure causes mesothelioma cancer, a deadly disease with no known cure.

Things You'll Need

  • tarps/plastic rolls
  • hand pressurized water sprayer (or hose)
  • wide hand trowels
  • drywall patch
  • sander
  • airless texture gun
  • texture mix

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