Popcorn ceilings! It only took me forever to write about these but hey, the post is here and maybe you care and maybe you’ll just move on but either way, let’s talk all about them! Specifically, let’s talk about getting rid of them!
It only took us three weeks of plugging away but our new house has 2300 square feet of smooth ceilings to add to it’s resume. I’m going to tell you all about how we went from popcorn to smooth but first, let’s do a quick Popcorn Ceilings 101.
What are popcorn ceilings?
A travesty, that’s what. Hehe…kidding. They’re not really
that bad and some people probably like them way more than we do and that’s a-ok. To each his own, right? Right. Popcorn ceiling refers to the popcorn-like/cottage cheese texture that some ceilings are covered with, especially in houses built in the 70’s, 80’s, beyond. Really, they just look like someone sprayed a mixture of teeny-tiny pieces of popcorn stirred up into thick chalk paint up onto the ceiling.
Apparently they have functional value in that they up the acoustics of a room – they make sound stop in it’s tracks and not bounce all over the place (though I can’t say that smooth ceilings really make sound in a room louder). They are also somewhat of a short cut on the building-of-the-house side in that ceilings don’t have to be “finished” quite as much as walls if they’re just going to get sprayed with popcorn texture. It covers a multitude of drywall imperfections and we. would. know. We recently finished (well, almost) making amends with those imperfections and THAT will be a whole ‘nother post.
Why get rid of them?
Well, there’s nothing super bad about them. Aesthetically, they’re just not the most pleasing. The texture creates lots of shadows on the ceiling which in turn makes a room darker. Light just kind of hits them and stops instead of bouncing off them to what’s below, like it does on smooth ceilings. They’re also great at holding onto dust and cob webs AND they can harbor allegens. Oh, and cigarette smoke (lots of fingers pointing to our ceilings). Let’s not forget about
that. Awesome, right? But, here’s the thing, they’re almost impossible to clean. Any amount of light scrubbing or on-contact vacuuming will most likely ruin them/create a ruined spot. You can attempt to fix spots but getting them to match the original is no easy task. The main reason that we are getting rid of ours (followed by aesthetics in a v v v close second) is because the previous owner of our home smoked inside and they were stained and held in that ashtray smell. Case in point, our master bedroom:
How do you get rid of them?
First of all and VERY importantly, if your home was built prior to 1980, your popcorn ceilings might be made with asbestos. Make sure you check first (you can buy test kits like this one* that note a lab fee) because if they are made with asbestos, you’ll have to leave the removal to a pro or learn to live with them.
You can have them professionally scraped and removed…but it’ll cost ya. We looked into this in our old house because the popcorn ceiling in our kitchen was discolored and we wanted to remedy that before we put it on the market. It was sort of a fiasco but in a nutshell, we tried to paint the popcorn, it started falling off with every roll of the paint, and in a panic, I called a local drywall specialist to see how much it would cost to have them removed. He quoted me $3/square foot so almost $600 for just our kitchen and dining nook.
Ouch. We ended up scraping what we could and then spraying a knock-down texture instead so we solved our dilemma but, just so you have an idea of pricing, our house is around 2400 square feet so we’d pay $7200 to have our popcorn ceilings removed down to those smooth beauties. Not a handful of change by any means and in our case, not worth the cash when we knew we could try it ourselves…with success, I might add. ;) Cha-ching…in our pockets.
Which leads me to option numero dos – scraping them off yourselves. I’ll be honest, it’s not nearly as bad as I thought. I’ll get more into that later.
You can also just cover them up.
Cindy did that with hers and the planks add a lot of character to her space. (Spoiler alert, we have some covering up plans for the bathroom that had painted popcorn. I’m dreaming of geometric tiles.)
Another option is to spray or have a professional spray them to create a knock-down texture look. My sister and her hubby had this done to their entire home and it cost them a small fraction of the cost it would have been to get them scraped.
Let’s get to the fun part though, shall we? DIYing those ceilings off. :D
