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When we bought our house 13 years ago, I don’t think hating popcorn ceilings was even a thing. I don’t even remember looking at the ceilings as our perky realtor showed us around what would be our new home. If I did look, I was probably only pleased to see that the ceilings weren’t sprinkled with shiny, gold flecks that our current house had.
Flash forward 13 years later, and all of the furniture from our first floor is shoved into our hearth room. My teenage girls look longingly at our kitchen table stacked in the corner as they try to eat their tortilla soup while standing around the one clean spot on the kitchen counter. Our light fixtures and smoke detectors are hanging precariously from the ceiling from single wires. And everything, and I mean EVERYTHING in our house is covered with a fine layer of dust.
I blame that couple from Texas.
You know the ones I am talking about – the cute couple with the silos? They are the reason my family is living in chaos.
I’m pretty sure they were to blame when my coworker arrived at work on a Monday several years ago looking exhausted. She explained she had spent the weekend scraping her ceilings. I asked if her pressure cooker had exploded, and she looked at me like I was an idiot and explained that she was scraping the popcorn texture off her ceiling. I told her I wasn’t even sure whether or not our ceilings were textured or not.
I’m pretty sure those Texans were to blame when I started noticing the Facebook photos of my friends covered with wet, gloopy paste who were chronicling the misery of their popcorn removal.
I know those our-tv-show-is-so-popular-that-we-now-have-a-decorating-line-at-Target-people were to blame when my friends who were trying to sell their house lost a buyer because their house had those dreaded popcorn ceilings.
They taunted me
I started noticing my ceilings more and more. They taunted me as I lay on the couch. They said, “I am the orange, shag carpet your parents had in their den clear up to 1992.”
My ceilings irritated me when I tried to grab a cobweb from the corner above our fireplace only to have flecks of plaster shower down on me.
Then last week, it was so cold in our area that schools and businesses shut down, and my teenage girls and I had an unexpected day at home because we are dumb enough to live in a place where we get this kind of weather. I guess I can’t blame those home remodelers in Texas for that.
I was making a cup of hot tea, ready to enjoy my day of Netflix and puzzles when I happened to look above my stove. My grimy-looking ceiling made me cringe because the grime was embedded in the popcorn. Something had to be done.
The project begins
I immediately went to the basement and started looking for supplies. The project that I envisioned lasted a day. I amazingly found plastic tarps and blue painter’s tape as well as a wide putty knife. I grabbed our pump water sprayer and ladder. I had a free day and all the supplies I needed. That popcorn never stood a chance.
My husband came down from his home office upstairs to find our kitchen walls, counters, and floors covered with plastic. I was cringing from my perch on the ladder as water droplets hit my face as I was saturating the ceiling with the water pump. My patient husband just shook his head, and without saying anything, turned around and went back upstairs. “It’s not my fault!” I called after him. I was beginning to assign blame for my actions, but he was already upstairs.
To be quite honest, scraping the ceilings was kind of fun. It was satisfying watching how easily the popcorn turns into a wet mush and scrapes cleanly away from the ceiling. I got into a pretty good rhythm as I blasted music from my portable speaker and worked my way across the room.
First, I climbed the ladder to spray a section of the ceiling as far as I could reach. It seemed to work better to have the spray nozzle as close to the ceiling as possible. By the time I finished saturating every part of the area with water, I grabbed my putty knife and gently scraped it along the portion that was soaked first.
To minimize cleanup, I held an old dustpan underneath the putty knife and tried to grab as much of the wet falling paste as I could before it hit the plastic tarps on the floor. This process required that I went up and down the ladder to drop the debris into my kitchen trashcan. By the way, if you try to capture some of the mess similarly, make sure you change your trash bag often. Wet popcorn ceiling juice is heavy, and if you wait too long to change out your garbage bag, you will regret it.
I finished the kitchen in a few hours. I could have gone faster if I had let the debris fall to the tarps on the floor.
My husband was kind enough to spackle a few areas that had been damaged by a leaky pipe a few years ago. He started to sand the ceiling as I ran to grab Chipotle. (One benefit of home renovation is that you can’t use your kitchen. Oh, darn.) The spackling and sanding process took a lot longer than I thought it would. We didn’t remove the plastic from the walls and the floor until the end of the next day, so we were forced to eat out a few more times.
More popcorn??
It’s been a week, and even though our kitchen is clean enough to cook in, all the rest of our furniture from the first floor is pushed into our hearth room. Now I’m in the process of removing the popcorn from our dining room and living room ceilings. Everything is covered with dust. Our German Shepherd looks at me in irritation because she can’t get to her favorite chair.
As I scrape, I think about the next steps in the process. We need to prime and paint the ceilings. But as long as the rooms are empty, doesn’t it make sense to paint the walls and woodwork too? And I’ve wanted to get rid of that builder’s grade beige carpet from my living room for years. Wouldn’t this be a good time to install hardwood floors?
If my husband gets too irritated with me, you can guess who I will blame.
