Popcorn Ceiling Removal

The Job Starts With a Sample, Not a Scraper

Every popcorn ceiling removal we take on in a house built before about 1980 begins the same way. We mist a small area, cut out a piece of the texture into a sealed bag, and send it to a laboratory. A few days later there is a report, and the report decides what happens next.

The reason is straightforward. Spray applied acoustic ceiling texture manufactured through the middle of the last century sometimes contained asbestos fibers. Use of it declined through the nineteen seventies, but material already sitting in warehouses and on trucks kept going up onto ceilings for a while afterward, which is why an age cutoff is a rule of thumb rather than a guarantee. Nobody can look at a ceiling and tell you. The fibers are microscopic and the texture looks identical either way.

Testing is not expensive and it is not slow. It is the cheapest part of the whole job by a wide margin, and it is the only part that cannot be redone later.

If the Result Is Negative

Then it is ordinary ceiling work, done wet.

The room is emptied where possible and sheeted where it is not. Floors get covered and taped at the perimeter, walls are papered up to the ceiling line, light fixtures and fans come down and get bagged, and any ceiling vents are sealed for the duration.

Then the ceiling is misted in sections with a pump sprayer and left a few minutes. Water soaks through the texture and softens the adhesive underneath, and a wide flexible blade takes it off in sheets onto the plastic below rather than into the air. Too much water and the paper face of the drywall goes soft and tears. Not enough and you are back to dry scraping, which is both harder work and a dust problem. Judging that is most of the skill.

One thing worth knowing before you start: a ceiling that has already been painted is much harder to remove, because the paint film stops the water reaching the texture. Those sometimes have to be scored, and occasionally the honest answer is to board over them instead.

Then the Part Nobody Photographs

A freshly scraped ceiling is not a finished ceiling. What you are left with is bare drywall with the taped joints standing proud, fastener dimples in rows, residue from the old spray adhesive, and every previous patch on display.

Getting to a flat plane takes two or three thin skim coats of joint compound, each one allowed to dry properly and sanded back between passes, worked with a wide blade rather than built up in one heavy layer. Then a primer, because bare compound and old paper soak up finish coat at completely different rates and a ceiling primed badly shows every joint as a stripe.

Two finish coats of a flat ceiling paint go on last. Flat, not eggshell. Any sheen on a ceiling picks out undulation that a matte finish forgives.

If the Result Is Positive

We stop, and we say so.

Removal of asbestos containing material is regulated work that calls for containment, negative air, trained crews and controlled waste disposal. That is an abatement contractor’s job, not a painting crew’s, and we do not hold ourselves out as anything else. We will hand you names, talk to whoever you choose, and stay out of the way.

Once the ceiling has been cleared, we come back for the half that is ours. Prime, skim, sand, paint, reinstate the fixtures.

Call (562) 981-8366 and tell us the year the house was built.