Removing Popcorn Texture? Here's the Step by Step method of removing it

hey everybody and welcome back to that kilter guy videos here on YouTube do you guys have some of that ugly popcorn ceiling like this stuff or some of these pictures here I'm going to show you and maybe you want to get rid of it well we're going to show you how to do that the professional way it's going to be a little bit quicker more thorough and give you a better job and we're going to show you how to do that right after this [Music] hey welcome back and thanks again for stopping by our channel here at that cuff guy videos we always appreciate all of our viewers and all your comments and of course your subscriptions and your thumbs up if you like our video now what we're going to talk about today is this stuff everybody refers to as popcorn ceiling some people call it cottage cheese texture the more official name is aggregated texture or we used to call it acoustical ceiling texture I'm one of the ones that sprayed this stuff back in the 70s I know don't don't throw rocks at me but we did spray a lot of this back then my dad and I he was a drywall contractor for many years and they called it a coup stucco ceiling texture because it actually the little balls in the popcorn ceiling those are little foam styrofoam balls and when they sprayed this on brand-new you had the raw kind of powdery drywall mud that was the base with these popcorn balls in it styrofoam balls and they actually had sound absorption properties to them so it was an acoustical deadening treatment now why else did we spray it back then well I think the biggest reason was it was cheap you see this and a lot of track homes in that and this party because we could do less work to get it ready for this because this hides a multitude of sins and we could spray it in and the painters would come in and not even paint it because it went on white it looked basically painted and hey you know saved a builder some money so that was probably the two big reasons and third I'm sure it was kind of a fad back then we even put glitter in it maybe you've seen some of that we would put gold or silver glitter in it and you'd have this nice sparkly ceiling which was kind of cool at the time but it's getting a little dated okay in this house most of the ceilings have actually not been painted and you can tell a lot of times by the flat kind of appearance to it a lot of times they're dirtier looking over the years that absorbs a lot of junk out of the air and the other way is get on the ladder or if you're tall reach up and rub it like that well this room's been painted so it doesn't work but if it hasn't been painted it will often just fall off because it's really not a very strong bond up there now some of the reasons for getting rid of popcorn ceiling texture there's actually quite a few let's start with the fact that it's dated to is it actually kind of hurts the resale value of your home it may not lower the price much but it does turn a lot of buyers away there was a concern of asbestos in this stuff pre-1980 some of it had asbestos in it so you might want to get it tested before you go messing with it but as a contractor I can't touch it if it's got asbestos but in our state here in Colorado the homeowner can but I would I would advise against it because we all know what asbestos is linked to like mesothelioma and that it's not a very safe thing once you disturb it if you leave it alone the asbestos is fine so if if you got that you want to get it tested and then you got to decide do you want to pay a remediation asbestos contractor to remove it which could cost you a fortune it could run six to ten thousand dollars for a small house or do you want to do it yourself or a third option you could actually put another layer of sheetrock right over it encapsulate it and finish it like new and and then you've eliminated that we do that sometimes but if it has asbestos we just don't scrape it don't disturb it the other things about it it tends to be kind of like a sponge it absorbs a lot of stuff out of the air especially if it hasn't been painted much it picks up a lot of the dust in the air you'll often see what looks like spider webs on the ceiling and especially around an air-conditioner vent you might see something like in this picture here where it just turns black around there and then your only option you can't wash it so your option is to paint it well it's really hard Payne because if it hasn't been painted before it tends to just get sucked right into your paint roller and you put a lot of it off the ceiling and it's just kind of a mess if you spray it you probably have to mask off all the walls or spray all the walls too and actually I mentioned to that because of the jagged surface up where the the popcorn meets the wall it's kind of hard to cut in a wall because you're actually having to cut in around each of those little jagged e bumps or just come close to it or something and so it's a lot more work to paint the way some of the methods that you can do it there's two or three we talked about encapsulating it with another layer sheetrock which is kind of expensive you can dry scrape it and that is if it lets you because sometimes it just isn't really good dry scrape you're gonna do more damage trying to dry scrape it but if it doesn't want to scrape dry or wet you may have to scrape dry versed knock off the peaks and have somebody come in a skim coat a layer of drywall mud over the whole surface in order to get that to smooth out to where you can put a new finish on it but i've i'd say about 80% of the time you can wet spray it and go ahead and get it removed that way now for tools you don't really need a whole lot we are our main tool is our scraper and what we use just to paint extension pole and we have mounted a 10-inch drywall mud knife on it and I've just done this with these hose clamps and this thing's been on here for years it's never come loose it holds really well so it's pretty effective method the disadvantage for me is it kind of ties up this pole but we've got several and you can go a little bit smaller you could use a six-inch I wouldn't go below a six-inch these smaller the knife is the less it flexes you can see these flex pretty easy these smaller nice flex less and less and because of that you're going to gouge the surface more when you're scraping the flexibility of this just to to kind of follow the contours a little bit more and scrape it without so much damage so you can go bigger but you get bigger and it's gonna get harder and harder to push and ten seems to be a pretty magic number for us so that's your main scraper okay and the other thing you'll probably want to have is it's handy to have a six-inch knife this works great for getting up there and cleaning out the angles up you've scraped everything also every now and then you need to clean your knife off so works good for that now you need a method to spray the water I've heard of people using just a spray bottle I sure wouldn't want to try it you might have to reload that spray bottle 20 30 40 times for one room if you can get hold of a garden sprayer your ordinary garden sprayer this will sure speed things up but for us we do a lot of this so I have made up my own kind of a homemade contraption here and I'll show you a picture of it this is basically an egg sprayer that you'd see like on a 15 or 20 gallon weed sprayer tank it runs off 12-volt puts out a lot more water I can drop it in a five gallon bucket and spray continuously and all I did was find a 12 volt adapter with enough amperage to run this then I plug it into the wall and run with we put about 20 feet of hose on here so we can move all over while we're spraying and we don't have to stop pump all the time stop and pump and go fill it up again every one and a half to two gallons we can go a lot longer get it done a lot faster so you probably won't need to do that but if you're trying to get into this business there's your an option now for supplies mostly what you need is the water with some kind of soap I've tried about everything and I'm not sure there's anything that works better than the other but my main go-to is this product called k'rud Kutter and I think it's spelled with a k we'll see if we can pop a picture up here like in this one we put about three gallons of water in here and about a cup of the k'rud Kutter but I think DOM dish soap or something like that would work fine the other supplies of course you're gonna need masking and we're going to talk about a couple of different ways to mask air on this job the homeowner is replacing all of the fluorine and they are repainting the entire house getting rid of this cool peachy color here because of that we didn't have to mask off as much as we normally would so in this case if you are gonna repaint the walls you could just cover the floors and then what we did is we masked off all the baseboard because it's actually a stained wood baseboard and we don't want to get this white crappy goopy stuff on it that's gonna make a mess out of it and we have to go back and wash it all plus we're gonna spray a primer on it when we're done and the painters is gonna take over from there so that will make it easier for us to spray the primer then we had to mask off all of the curtains and we just run a solid strip of tape across the plastic this is a 9 by 400 visqueen which is 0.3 1 mil thick it's really really thin but works great for this because tape sticks to it really well it's really light so it doesn't want to pull your tape off the wall and it's cheap I think 9 9 foot wide by 400 costs somewhere around 25 dollars which is a lot cheaper than the heavier stuff we're standing on 6 mil because what we're doing is just moving this 6 mil around as we scrape would catch it roll this up to the middle get a scoop shovel that we haven't dumped it into our trash this 6 mil in comparison I think this is 10 by 100 and it cost something like $50 so now what we also did is we took a little piece of shim and ran some staples in up here because after we spray this with water the water tends to want to make the tape turn loose and then this could just fall off and we could make a mess out of the curtains and lose our work we did so we just put a couple shims about every 6 or 8 feet put a couple staples in them they're really short staples that pull out real easy they make minimal damage and it keeps the plastic up you also should go through and remove things like ceiling fan blades at least take the blades down and mask off all those mask off lights and that I'd recommend on lights that you loosen them there's different ways they loosen up but loosen it drop it down about 1/8 of an inch or a quarter so it you can scrape under it now if you're going to not paint the walls what you want to do is mask all of the walls because if you scrape this and it comes down on the wall it's gonna make it a mess a white mess all over that you got to try and clean and it's it's difficult so we just mask everything with the same film we just run it completely one solid piece all the way around the room starting at the door and ending at the door overlapping so we can walk through it but it covers everything we hold it down about six inches because if you try to get too tight to this after you scrape it you're gonna have a little gap up there so you gotta count on that plus a lot of its gonna come loose it's not gonna be the greatest masking for painting so we hold it down about six inches we do all the scraping we come in the next day and re mask and now we can mask tighter to the ceiling and then we we mask with a strip of nine-inch paper and then we tape that paper to the plastic which then helps hold this plastic up seals it all makes it a nice tight unit here so that now when we paint no paint is going to get by so that kind of pretty much covers the masking now we're gonna move on to the actual process okay now we're ready to tackle this thing we got our weapon or choice water sprayer and all you all you really have to do is spray it multiple times usually it takes at least twice even if it hasn't been painted we did a little test on this one and I think it's gonna come off even though it's been painted the more it's been painted in the glossary of the paint the harder it tends to be to come off or to get it off so you just have to kind of experiment and I would really recommend you find some out-of-the-way place and do a little test scrape say one square foot because if you find it's really gonna scrape hard you don't want to get all that masking done and all that prep and then find out you can't even scrape it really we're not going to talk too much here just gonna start spraying some water and I'll probably do a little sped up time-lapse cuz because you don't really need to watch this over and over but the main secret is get it as wet as you can if it starts dripping off the ceiling very much probably got it too wet it'll often drip a little bit but if it turns into a rainstorm in there get your slicker out and leave the room evacuate immediately call authorities no I'm just kidding you put too much on so you want to get it a good soaking and then just let it sit and let it soak and it'll usually take about 15 minutes to soaking between coats now if it hasn't been painted you can generally soap just one right after the other because it absorbs it quickly but with it painted like this take your time soak it multiple times to give it time to soak in and you may have to put on up to four to five even six coats of water I've had to wait two hours with soaking before it would start scraping so that's why you want to do the test to find out what works for you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] little joke there hey we're back and we have let this soak for about 15 minutes we've got two coats of water on it I did a little test scrape over here and I think it's ready to go and that's what you do in between you let it soak a little while when you're ready to spray the next one get your scraper out go test scrape and see how it looks now on these scrapers most of these knives often they have a slight curve to them I set this one is curved like this and so I have mounted it so that when I hold it up there like that the tips are down they're less likely to dig into the sheetrock you can't often get away with running it like this but if you start seeing the edges digging in you're gouging taking that little chunks more all that flip it over right this way okay now there is actually some technique to how you do this one reason we like the pole is that allows us to stand down here without having to be up here on a ladder or something but if you don't have that use what you've got but the main thing is that you want to have this angled about like a 45 if you get it too much like this you're gonna dig in and it's gonna do more damage you lay it down enough you're not going to take off enough you want to actually take off as much of this popcorn and the the carrier mud as you can and you'll see what will get quite a bit of that off and then we're gonna take care of the rest of it with some sanding tomorrow once it dries so start out with the little test spot here you can sometime just dig in if it hasn't been painted it'll sometime fall off and crumbles if it's been painted it'll come off in sheets like this so let me actually get this out of the way and another little tip here it's going to get really messy this is going to stick to your shoes or if you're like me I'm barefoot because I can I have neuropathy in my feet I can't hardly wear shoes but being barefoot I can just scrape it off and then wipe my feet off on a rag or something I'm good to go shoes are much harder to clean I haven't found a great solution to that other than take them out and hose them off with hose the other thing is this plastic gets slick it's wet you can slip and fall so be careful and as always you're handling sharp objects you probably should wear safety gear this isn't really dusty so we don't wear that safety gear but I'm gonna go ahead and put it out there wear some safety gear if you need to so you get it started like that and then just apply fairly firm pressure and push now when you get near the edge like that there's a piece of corner tape that runs an inch and a quarter down here to inch and a quarter over here so be careful as you push into the angle because you could just dig it right up and then you've got to do some repairs there so just take take it easy when you get over here and then the other way see I actually caught the edge of it right there you probably can't see that but the other way is to go down the angle this way so scrape what I usually recommend is straight up to it stop about right there and then turn and come down and get that last little bit you'll do less damage to your joint tape but this process is next to impossible to not do some damage you might get lucky [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay that's basically you're scraping procedure now you're gonna have a lot of little debris in here you could do this today or tomorrow just go along and just kind of lightly cut along there and that knock some of it off then tomorrow we're gonna show you how to clean that up even more so stay tuned we'll be right back okay it's now day two and we've let this dry overnight we ran some fans in here to help dry everything out I think I mentioned before but if not I like to dry out the popcorn on the floor because it weighs a whole lot less a bag in my big brute trashcan we just fill it like 2/3 3/4 full it weighs about 80 pounds so it gets pretty heavy and that's with a dry version so if it's wet it really adds up fast you can only fill it up maybe half full ok now that it's dry you can see how the ceiling looks here it's not bad but if you were to paint this just the way it is which I seen some people do it looks pretty crappy it really does not look good so I highly advise against doing that it needs some kind of texture or if you're gonna leave it smooth needs a lot more work and one of the first things you can do is to sand it now we've got our power sander back here but first thing I would start is in your angles because there's almost always a little bits of debris in there and my sander won't reach into the angles a lot of senders even a pole sander has a little bit of difficulty so what I recommend let's go ahead and move up high and I'll show you how we're gonna tackle the ceiling from here okay so what you want to do when you're up here in the angles is use your six-inch knife and again these sixes have a fairly square corner mind so worn out it's actually rounded here but it still has a fairly good 90 right here which makes it work well in these angles in that so you just go along sometimes I do what I did yesterday which is lightly cut that scrape it a little more just kind of clean it up and then you can take one of these sponge centers and using the too abrasive sides just run it through here pretty quickly about like that now you've got your angle cleaned up you go around the whole room do that and then your angles are ready okay the next step is you want to sand the whole ceiling and I'm gonna sand a little bit for you to show you how far we take it you see the before picture again and then I'm going to show you an after picture but I'll let you see what we do with the sanding now I will point out this is a very dusty messy operation I highly recommend safety goggles and a dust mask but we are using a $1,200 Porter Cable drywall sander which you can often rent for about $20 a day it's well worth it here's a picture of it I'll show you here on the screen the only dust that's going to get away from us is with our sander here and because this is a spinning center it does sometimes shoot dust out the site if you let it get a little bit loose against the ceiling or when you pull it down there's there's various times that will so it's not totally dust free but while it's sanding it's generally trapping at least 85 to 90% of the dust you can use a pole sander or you could probably hand sand it but we'll show you how we do it the professional way here [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay as you can see very little dust got away from us there I'm going to show you the after picture now and this is what it looks like after we sanded it basically looks almost like a new construction job again we've got rid of most of that white chalky dust that you can see in the before picture and compare that to the after picture and that's what we're going for because that white chalky dust it it isn't really stuck very good at this point so if you apply anything over it then whatever you apply such as textures not really stuck that well and that's partly why we get rid of it plus it smooths out the whole surface and brings it back to a like-new condition again now at this stage once you've got it all sanded you have to look and decide what you've got to do for repairs for example here's some repairs that popped up I'll show you a picture here this is a crack and little damage in the angles and we also sometimes get bigger cracks we get nail pops we get all kinds of damage that appears after we've done this and you've just got to go through and be able to fix that so what I normally do it depends on each job looks like this one might not need it I normally go through them coat every joint again and part of the reason is when we did this stuff back in the 70s we could get by with one less coat and some guys did so once we scrape this off now it's one coat short for a good finish so we go through and coat everything including all the nails which in this case these are nails not screws nails generally come in these - you'll have two - and two that indicates those are nails for sure so we'll go through and coat all those again touch up any bad areas fix anything that needs fix any you'll see some things like on this job this came up we find out that there was a previous repair and we have to rework it a little bit make better you'll you'll find these kind of things when you uncover your ceiling with this popcorn ceiling so go through and do all your repairs get everything coated that you need sand it again depending on the texture your gonna do if you're going to do a lighter orange peel finish for example you'll need to work it further leave less edges make it a better finish to start with before your texture but if you're gonna do something heavy like a skip trial like we're going to do you can get by with less finish work doesn't mean you can leave nasty stuff behind but you can leave more edges and a few more minor defects because you can cover it with your texture now I'm going to clarify that means minor defects you can't cover deep nail holes I will even coat most of these nails just because they can show through because once you texture it your muds gonna shrink a little bit and it'll Telegraph or photograph the defects right back through the mud so you don't want that if you're not real familiar with how to finish drywall watch some of our other videos on repairing holes and such and that'll give you a little better insight into what you've got to do here so we're gonna go ahead and get it back at it here I'm gonna sand the rest of this house and we're gonna start fixing any damage and such and then after that we're basically ready to texture it so I hope this video helps you with your popcorn ceiling removal if you got any questions feel free to ask us in the comments and as always we thank you for stopping by and checking out our channel and if you haven't done it yet we would appreciate you subscribing at the end that helps you and it helps us because you'll get notified when we release new videos that may help you out with another project and it helps us by getting us shown more on YouTube some there's also some links in the description below for information we may have links to where you can buy some of the items we use in here and other information and as always if you liked the video give us a thumbs up if you don't give us a thumbs down and let me know why I appreciate it thanks for stopping by again until the next video we'll see them [Music]

Channel: That Kilted Guy DIY Home Improvement

Views: 723,952

Rating: 4.8201361 out of 5

Keywords: popcorn texture, removing popcorn texture, how to remove popcorn ceiling, popcorn ceiling removal, removing popcorn ceiling with shop vac, how to remove popcorn, removing popcorn texture from ceiling, remove popcorn ceiling, popcorn ceiling removal tool, How to remove / scrape your popcorn ceiling CLEANLY, how to remove popcorn ceiling texture, removing popcorn ceiling, remove popcorn ceiling without a mess, scraping popcorn ceiling, how to get rid of popcorn ceiling

Id: IkqCj0wFzwU

Length: 29min 19sec (1759 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 02 2018