Post #85045 by Humuhumu on Wed, Apr 7, 2004 9:12 AM

Besides being incredibly difficult to paint, painting a popcorn ceiling makes it much, much, much harder to later remove. Removing an unpainted popcorn ceiling is actually pretty trivial -- tape your walls & floor up with plastic, wet the stuff down with a sprayer, scrape it off (this will actually take less time than taping off with plastic), take your messy plastic-water-and-popcorn bundle and toss it.

The wetting down is important for two reasons: it comes off more easily and cleanly if it's wet, and if it's wet you won't get airborne dust particles, which could be full of asbestos. If you're gonna be all legal-like, you need to have a small sample of the ceiling tested for asbestos (costs abour $50, look in the yellow pages), and if it comes back positive, you need to have it professionally removed and properly disposed of. This gets pretty pricey (and of course pricier if the ceiling has previously been painted, making it very difficult to wet for proper removal). If you're not gonna be all legal-like, you're actually pretty safe as long as you're not breathing the stuff. It's up to you whether you can sleep well at night knowing you've tossed asbestos into the normal garbage.

Popcorn was sometimes used to cover serious ceiling flaws, or instead of properly finishing a ceiling, so sometimes there's more work to be done besides re-painting what's underneath. Unless you're a homeowner, it's not worth doing anything at all. Don't touch the stuff.