Just spent 3 hours removing old popcorn ceiling texture from my living room in Edmonton - was it worth the mess or should I have just skim coated over it?

Scraping that stuff off took forever and made a huge dust cloud everywhere (even with plastic sheeting), but now I'm wondering if the smooth finish looks better than what I'd get with a thin layer of mud, so has anyone else tried both methods and regretted one more?

2 comments

2 Comments

lee_butler22d ago

Three hours of scraping and you're already second guessing? I went through this same debate with my basement ceiling in Calgary last year. Skim coating over popcorn can work if the texture is thin and well bonded, but I found the mud cracks and looks inconsistent compared to a properly scraped surface. The dust is brutal, no arguing that, but a smooth ceiling from scraping gives way cleaner lines around edges and lighting. If you've still got brown paper showing or gouges in the drywall from scraping, you'll probably end up skim coating anyway to patch those, so it's not always one or the other.

beth_ward8022d ago

Actually I'm gonna go the other way on this. A buddy of mine skim coated his entire 600 square foot living room ceiling without scraping a single speck of popcorn, and it's been three years with zero cracking. The trick is using a really thin first coat of all purpose mud and letting it dry completely before the next pass - most people lay it on too thick and that's where the cracks come from. Plus you skip the nightmare of wet scraping which can tear up the paper facing bad, and you avoid breathing in that godawful dust for hours on end. You get a smooth enough surface for most lighting unless you're putting in recessed cans with super harsh shadows, and honestly who's staring at a ceiling that hard anyway.