how to remove a popcorn ceiling.

Have you been thinking of removing the popcorn texture on your ceiling, but are too afraid or just don’t know how? Well, hopefully this blog post will put those concerns to rest! G and I have officially scraped almost every square inch of our 2800+ sq. foot home, so you could basically consider us experts at it 😉 We’ve definitely learned the do’s, the don’ts and the quick tricks that make your life easier in the process.. and that’s what I’m going to share with you today.

Let’s start with a video I made of our recent (and final) popcorn ceiling scraping project. It details the step-by-step and hopefully it’ll put to rest any fears you may have about the process. Then, I’ll go into more detail.

(I apologize for G’s shirtlessness – it was hard enough to get him to put pants on? ??‍♀️)

Okay, so let’s talk about steps 1-7 specifically.

Step 1: Prep

This is the step that’s going to make your life easier in the long run, so take your time and do it right. Trust me, you don’t want to do a crappy job covering your floor or skip the part about caring for your windows. We’ve made the mistake of doing both and it takes FOREVER to clean up afterwards – we still have popcorn ceiling caked on our blinds in some parts of our house.

Here’s the lowdown on prepping the room:

– Use a plastic cover (we’ve used these and these but prefer the latter because they’re thicker and don’t break/tear as easily!) and painters tape to protect outlets, baseboards and floors. There will be water everywhere so this is really important! Note: You’ll also want to cover the walls from the ceiling down if you’re not planning to paint them. We didn’t do this because we wanted to repaint ours a different color anyway.

– Pull your blinds all the way to the top and then cover at least the top portion of your windows.

– Remove any registers from the ceiling

– Turn off your AC/heater. We didn’t do this while scraping most of our upstairs and the dust and ceiling particles wreaked havoc on our furnace!

– Remove light fixtures

Once all that’s done, you can move on to step two.

Step 2: Spray the Ceiling with Water

It feels so weird to be spraying any part of the interior of your home with water – but it won’t hurt it! It’s completely necessary in order to be able to scrape the texture off. We use a simple multipurpose sprayer to make quick work of it. Spray the entirety of the room with 2 or 3 good coats and then let it sit for at least 30 minutes so it has a chance to soften the ceiling texture.

We’ve tried adding about a cap full of fabric softener to the water before spraying (we saw some people do this on YouTube), but the only thing we really think it did was make the room smell nice – which wasn’t a bad thing! So, add some if you’d like, but it’s not completely necessary in my opinion.

Step 3: Scrape the Ceiling

Once you’ve prepped the room and watered it thoroughly, it’s time to get to scrapin’! This is actually pretty fun. Using a putty knife or paint scraper, place the blade almost parallel with the ceiling and begin slowly and carefully (but firmly!) scraping away the texture. It should slide right through – if not, wet it some more.

In terms of scrapers, we’ve used several different kinds but they all basically work the same. We actually started off using one of these thinking it would keep the room clean, but it slowed us down too much, still made a mess and was honestly pretty difficult to use so I don’t recommend it. Personally, I like a simple putty knife with a longer blade only because its scrapes more surface area at a time – speeding up the process a little.

Step 4: Primer

Once you’ve gotten the entire ceiling scraped, it’s time to apply primer. Some people ask if this is necessary – but it absolutely is. Not only does the primer help to prep the ceiling (now bare drywall) for paint, but it also helps to cover up small imperfections as well as helps you see where you’ll need to mud in the next step.

We used Kilz All-Purpose Interior/Exterior Primer. Just pour it into a paint try and roll it on. Give your ceiling a good hearty layer – it’ll only help!

Step 5: Mud the Ceiling

This is a really important step – and probably the trickiest. G has been in charge of all the mudding throughout our projects and says it takes a little bit to get the hang of it, but it’s not bad! He uses a metal mud pan and another paint scraper to apply/smooth it out. There are tons of different videos on YouTube of how to do this (sorry, I was busy giving the baby a bath while G did this part!).

Another option is to apply mud to the entire ceiling and use a float to level the whole thing. This would probably give you a much smoother finish, but our method worked just fine for our needs. Our ceilings aren’t perfectly smooth, but if you look at any one ceiling (even the ones done by the pros), chances are you’ll find they aren’t completely smooth either. But one – nobody’s going to sit there and study your ceiling and two – sanding and painting it will do wonders to make it look great! Which brings us to the next step.

Step 6: Sand the Mud Down

Once the mud has had a chance to dry (wait overnight or take a blowdryer to it to speed things up), we use a sanding sponge to smooth out the edges of the mud. You can also use this time to sand any other areas of the ceiling where you see rough spots. The primer dries almost white, so it gives you a pretty good idea of what the ceiling will look like with paint – if you’re not happy with it, sand down areas until its smooth and to your liking.

Step 7: Paint

The final step is simply to paint the ceiling (and walls unless you covered them)! For the ceiling, we used i300 White Base Dead Flat Interior Paint for our ceilings and Classic Gray by Benjamin Moore for all our walls. When painting your ceiling, keep in mind that the flatter, or more matte, the paint is, the more it will hide imperfections so go as flat as possible. We used a roller first to get as close to the edges as possible and then used a regular paint brush to finish up the unreached areas.

After that, you’ll just need to clean up and replace your light fixtures and registers – and that’s it! I hope this post answered any questions you may have about how to remove a popcorn ceiling. If it didn’t, feel free to ask questions in the comments below – I love to hear from you guys!

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