Scrape It, Scrape It Good!

Before we start, you should probably go get yourself a bowl of popcorn and watch this video:

Now that you've whipped up some popcorn and possibly just busted a move to Devo's "Whip It," we can now begin to tell you all about how we scraped off our ugly popcorn ceiling and made it as smooth as a baby's bottom.
Looking back, we should've done this before we ever painted the stripes onto our one entryway wall.  Oh well, lesson learned.  Enough jibber jabber, lets get to it!

First things first, we sprayed the ceiling with a little bit of warm water just to soften up the texture a little. In the picture below, you can see where we sprayed half of the ceiling and the other half hadn't been sprayed yet.

Since I am too short to reach the ceiling, even when standing on our little person step stool, hubby got assigned the job of scraping. I was in charge of the vacuum.  Here's another thought.  If you are going to take on this project in your own home, put a drop cloth down before you start.  We made the mistake of not putting one down and our hardwood floors were not a fan of the white debri. Also, it is probably best to wear a mask and eye wear.  You do not want to breathe in the debri.

Hubby unscrewed our light fixtures and smoke detector so that we could have full access to the ceiling. Then he began to scrape and I began to sing, "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas..."

We had some pretty good teamwork going on.  Once he was done scraping one section of the ceiling, I would immediately vacuum the debri that had fallen.  We discovered that we needed to re-dampen some of the spots on the ceiling.  When you scrape a section that is completely dry, most of the texture comes down as dust, whereas if you dampen the texture a bit, it'll come down in clumps and leave a smoother texture on the ceiling. This process took us around 20 minutes to complete.

After scraping, our ceiling looked like this:

The next step was to prime the ceiling.  As you can see, in some areas we had the ceiling scraped down to the drywall, so we really needed a primer that was going to fully cover up the brown that was showing.  We went with Valspar High-Hiding Primer that was best for drastic color change.  After one coat of the primer, our ceiling looked like this:

Thankfully the primer gave us full coverage over the brown spots and you could no longer see them!  We then went back to the store and picked up a gallon of this stuff, which I thought was super cool because it was color changing.  I mean who doesn't love a paint that rolls on pink and turns white?!

Here's what it looked like in action:

Holy pinkness!

After rolling one coat of paint on (we did have to go back and touch up a couple of areas, but other than that, it coated fairly well with just one coat!) we called it a day.  Our end result looked like this:

We are very fond of the ceiling in our front entryway now.  We've looked at it numerous times and said to each other, "You'd never even know that our ceiling once had popcorn texture." Sad part is, we have popcorn ceiling all over our house.  We can live it up now, but once we move on to other rooms of the house, we will have to do this process all over again. Argh!

Also in the picture above, you get a sneak peek of our new light!  One gold light fixture down, a million to go! 

Here's our "popcorn ceiling removal" price breakdown for those of you out there that are curious:

Gallon of Valspar High-Hiding Primer: $17.98

Gallon of Zinsser Paint and Primer in One: $23.97

Plastic Drop Cloth: $5.96

4-8 Ft. Paint Roller Extension: $10.99

Scraper: $6.98

Water Sprayer: Free (we already had one)

Paint Tray: Free (we already had one)

____________________________________________

Total: $65.88

Is your house full of popcorn textured ceilings?  Does looking at them make you want to grab a bowl of popcorn?  Have you scraped them smooth using a different technique?  We'd love to hear about your experience with popcorn ceilings! :)