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How to Get Rid of that Ugly Popcorn Ceiling

Sam Lutz • May 1, 2018
How to Get Rid of that Ugly Popcorn Ceiling
No matter what your ceilings are telling you, it’s 2018. The Beatles aren’t touring anymore. Mickey Mantle doesn’t play for the Yankees anymore. Perhaps more important than any of these facts: nobody has a popcorn ceiling anymore. Sure, they may have been a hit back in the day. However, fast forward 40 years, and they’re just not that cool anymore. Sorry. Don’t worry, though. We’re going to give you a step-by-step guide on how to get rid of it.

Preparing to Remove Your Popcorn Ceiling

First thing’s first, it’s going to be messy. Unfortunately, there’s just no way around it. Cover everything and anything you can. Get as much of the furniture out of the room you’re working on. Remove your ceiling fan, cover the floors with a tarp and the walls with plastic. There’s going to be pieces of popcorn flying everywhere once you start scraping.

Ready to Scrape

Your first actual step is to take a scraper and see how the ceiling reacts, and how difficult it is for the popcorn portion to come off. If you’ve painted over your ceiling in the past, this can make it a bit tougher to remove than if you’ve left it alone since installation.
Sometimes the popcorn portion of the ceiling will come off right away. Other times it’s stubborn. One trick is wetting the ceiling. How do you do that? Take a power washer and… just kidding. You can use a much gentler version of a power washer, such as water pump. Wetting the ceiling makes it softer. The popcorn particles will just fall right off.

Don’t Get Crazy

It can be tempting to take the largest scraper you can find and cover large areas very quickly. However, there are a few reasons this isn’t a good idea:

Stop in at Ace Paints

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