The down and (MOST DEFINITELY) dirty of removing popcorn ceilings

Tell all ya friends and neighbors!

Sharing the ins and outs, good and bad and dirty truth about our experience with removing popcorn ceilings

Okay. I think I’m emotionally far enough removed so I can finally write this post. Y’all. Just writing the title and having to face the memories of the madness that this project was still makes me shudder. Removing popcorn ceilings was B R U T A L. DO YOU HEAR ME, INTERNET? BRUTAL. I do not know how on earth people do this WHO LIVE IN THE HOUSE.

First, we covered all the carpeted areas with plastic.

We of course researched the best course of action, so we had ready 2 ShopVacs and even this really cool fancy schmancy sander thingie (<– technical term) to sand the popcorn off. We also didn’t have an actual popcorn ceiling scraper like this one so we improvised with just a thing you use for drywall.

Looked great, right? And it took all of 5 minutes to do this little patch. You hooked up the sander to the end of the ShopVac and it sucked up all the stuff.

Which sounds great in theory. Alas, it did NOT work long term.

SO.

MUCH.

DUST.

You should have seen it. It was comedic. And by comedic I mean laugh until you cry without the laughing first. This picture was from going back over WHAT HAD ALREADY BEEN SANDED which was about a foot of ceiling.

RELATED: See how we transformed this room into our son’s nursery!

So, then we just went the old fashioned route. We got this garden sprayer, filled it with warm water, pumped it up approximately 1.7 billion times per square foot, sprayed the water, then scraped. We only filled the sprayer halfway because carrying that crap on your shoulder freaking hurts, dude.

I must say the process of ACTUALLY scraping was easy. Although, please note “easy” does not mean fun or cute or anything that easy normally means. It just means it didn’t make me want to burn the house down for insurance money.

I will say that this little (big) guy came in clutch for removing our popcorn ceilings. I’m going to link soon to the shortest, most hilarious tutorial on how to make this if you’re interested. {update: here ya go, folks!}

I’m gonna be honest and say I’m not going to do a tutorial on this because there are entirely too many and even more honestly, I don’t want to. K? K. So instead, here are a few pictures of just the aftermath of this popcorn ceiling removal. Freaking enjoy.

That’s all I can stand. Too many memories.

Cost:

• Walkboard – $19.64 ( + tax, tag, title, and fees)
• Garden sprayer – $14.99 (+ 20% off coupon because everything is always on sale at Harbor Freight. Like Kohl’s. And Old Navy.)
• ShopVac – free.99 cuz we borrowed it PTL but I would say it’s a necessity for this project, especially for cleanup.
• Prosthetic arms after you want to amputate your own – Price dependent upon location.

Minimum Total Investment:

$35 and up, depending on the price of your arms and dignity.

Would we do this again?

Uh, H no. No, we would not.

On to the next project for us to take from gross to grandiose….