Scraping commences

The ceilings in most of the house have a heavy coating of paint over the popcorn. What joy. That is gross for a lot of reasons - the biggest being that it makes removal a lot more problematic.

Popcorn (cottage cheese) ceiling texture is really nothing more than little particles held in a mixture of drywall mud. The mud is particularly water-soluble, so if you get it wet, the texture is generally pretty easy to scrape off with minimal effort.

Not so when it's been painted, though. Paint is a pretty good water seal, so you have to break through it to get your water in to do its job.

I first tried a tentative scrape without moisture, just to see how tightly the junk was going to hold on.

Not too bad, so far. It isn't coming off easy, but it's not holding on for dear life, either.

Encouraged by my little 2-square-foot test, I pulled out the ladder, and armed with two spray bottles, two plastic stripping/scraping tools and a fancy Ceiling Texture Scraper tool from Home Depot, I went to work in earnest.

By the way, the floors underneath the icky carpet in the bedroom? Icky fake-parquet vinyl tiles.

It took a little bit of a learning curve. The most important steps to scraping a painted popcorn ceiling, I've discovered:

1. Scrape off as much surface texture as you can first, while the ceiling is still dry. I did most of this with the specialized de-texturing tool in this room, but I believe I'm going to switch to a 1/16" v-notch trowel for the next one. You want something that'll really rough it up quite a bit.

2. Soak it with your spray bottle. If you're the kind of person who usually overdoes things, you'll need less water than you think. If you're the kind of person who usually doesn't do enough the first time around, you'll need more water than you think. You want to find that perfect balance where your popcorn gets soaked, but your drywall's paper layer doesn't lose adhesion.

3. After the first soaking, move to another section and work there for about 10 - 15 minutes to let the water do its work.

4. Return to the previous location and see if your texture is ready to come off. If you did it right, the junk will drop off with minimal resistance. If you're scraping still-solid mud, you need to rewet and come back.

5. Soft plastic tools seem the best bet for me, at least for now. When we get to the living room downstairs, those ceilings haven't been painted, and I'll revisit the special scraping tool. But for now, its blade is simply too big and flexible for it to be of much use. Its handy ring to hold a bag for falling debris is certainly a nice touch, though.

6. Resign yourself to getting dirty. Really, really dirty. Mud washes out of clothing VERY easily, luckily.

Sorry about what I've done to your shirt, Gary Numan.

Anyhow, the end result? Totally worth the eight hours of hard labor it took. The ceilings are completely clear now, and all they need is a little skim coat, and they'll look like they were always smooth as a sheet. Lucky for me, the drywalling in this house appears to be top-notch.

One room down, eleven to go. The rest will be much easier now that I know what I'm doing.