When we bought our house, one of the things we asked the seller to do was cut down the dead tree in front of the house. It was a pretty large dead tree and we saw it as a potential threat if it were to fall toward the house, but the seller ended up refusing to have it removed. Ames’ parents were planning to come up next weekend and they were going to bring us a spare chainsaw so we could take it out. Well, apparently with all the rain we’ve had lately, it decided to come down on it’s own. Fortunately it fell AWAY from the house. We spent the evening trying to get what we could out of the neighbor’s yard. I think we’ve decided to give up for now until we get a chainsaw.

Looking back, I’ve been posting a lot more about house stuff and very little about webdesign or development. So…as a side note, I just wanted to say I’m very excited and inspired by the ALA Redesign. In case you haven’t checked it out yet, the new design is by Jason Santa Maria, css is by Eric Meyer, and the backend is built on rails by Dan Benjamin. How crazy is that? There’s even a few custom promo shirts, including this XHTML fist one on the right by Kevin Cornell. I think I have to buy it.

Ames and I have been pretty big on the weekend home improvement projects, but the more we get moved into our house, the more we realize that we need “things”…things like window coverings for our bedroom…and living room furniture. You know, expensive things. The types of things you want to look nice and cohesive when you have a home, but don’t want to pay a lot for. With that in mind, we made the 3 hour trek to the nearest Ikea in Atlanta, Georgia on Saturday.

For those who have never been to an Ikea store, don’t think furniture store, think theme park. The place has a parking garage, parking attendants, two restaurants, child care, and escalators you can ride with a cart. This isn’t the type of place you can spin through on your way home from work, but the products they have are well designed, unique, and inexpensive. Unfortunately, they were out of stock of the sofa set we were planning on buying, which was the main reason for the trip. We did make it worthwhile however by picking up lighting, shelving, and some dinosaurs, among a bunch of other cool stuff.

Last weekend we had our first visitors at our new house. Our friends Josh, Erica, and their son Silas stopped by on their way back to Gainesville to hang out and help us with some home improvement. They actually left early this morning, but I’m still feeling sore, bug-bitten, and tired. Between Saturday and Sunday, Josh and I probably spent close to 20 hours working outside around the house.

The only project that really needed to get done this weekend was installing handrails on the stairs to the side and back deck. That project was assigned to us by our homeowners insurance company and was required to be done 30 days from closing. With Josh’s construction experience and the couple extra hands, we were able to knock that project out on Saturday morning.

The rest of the weekend was spent making our yard look more like a yard…and could only be classified as manual labor. We trimmed trees, dug out railroad ties and walkway planks, demolished wooden fences, and hacked out a sea of bushes. Ames and Erica were getting a lot of work done as well. When they weren’t out helping us in the yard, they were inside taking care of Silas and tearing up some wallpaper. Although Josh and I didn’t watch Silas nearly as much as the girls did, we sometimes took turns carrying him around in the “Baby Backpack”.

There is no way Ames and I could have gotten all the things we got done this weekend if it weren’t for Josh and Erica. We really wanted it to be more like a vacation for them, but they insisted on working and really pushed us to get a lot done. After a weekend like that, you really know who your friends are.

Popcorn belongs in a movie theatre bucket drenched in butter, not on a ceiling. Cottage Cheese? Well let’s just say it’s something I never want to see in large quantities when I look up. Whoever came up with the idea of spray-on textured ceilings was a lazy contractor…and the marketing guru that decided to pass the product off for its acoustic properties was a creative genius. Unless you have a large empty room with hard floors, there is no need for an “acoustic” ceiling…and in that case you should just buy a rug and some soft furniture and get over it. Somehow though, this bumpy, crumbly, nasty substance was applied to every ceiling in the house we just bought. All my wife and I can figure is that people must have thought this stuff was really groovy in the 70s to want to apply it to a bathroom and a kitchen. I can just imagine how much cooking steam and pee vapors have been absorbed into those curds. MMMmmm…

As you can probably guess by now, Ames and I would eradicate the entire world of popcorn ceilings if we could. For now though, we’re just planning on tackling the entire house. We only moved in about two weeks ago, but we’ve already cleared the curds from the office, guest bedroom and our master bedroom. Through our experiences so far, and the little bit of preparatory research we did before getting started, I think we’ve got a pretty good method established for removing the corn.

Note: Asbestos was used in some sprayed coatings for ceilings from 1935-1978 and can cause Mesothelioma & Asbestosis. It’s a good idea to have a sample tested by an NVLAP approved testing center before getting started.

Materials Needed:

• Contractors/Masking Paper
• Pump Sprayer
• Sanding Respirator Masks
• Safety Goggles
• Wall Scraper or Trowel
• Joint Compound or Drywall Patch
• Putty Knife
• Pole Sander and Sanding Screen
• Ladder

Getting Started

Remove all furniture from the room and lay down the Contractors/Masking Paper being sure to overlap each strip by 4-5 inches. This will allow for easier cleanup later. Turn off the breaker to the room and remove all ceiling light and fan fixtures.

Getting Messy

Using a pump sprayer, wet a 5-6 foot square section of popcorn being careful not to get too much water on the walls. Wait a couple minutes before getting started to allow the water to soak into the textured ceiling. Using a wall scraper or trowel (non-serated side), start scraping off the texture. It should come off in sheets, although on a ceiling where the there is a lot of patching and joint compound, this will not be quite as easy. In our guest bedroom (which we tackled last weekend), the ceiling under the popcorn was literally covered in joint compound, tape, and drywall patches…which can make this part of the job a nightmare. Done with that section already? Time to wet another section, and start the process again…and again, until it’s done. Once most of the texture had been scraped down to the joint compound and wallboard, you’ll want to use a pole sander to knock down the rough spots in the ceiling. Be sure to sand the entire surface, getting it as smooth as possible. In my opinion, this is the hardest and messiest part of the whole process…unless you have a nightmare ceiling like our guest bedroom. In that case, it parallels the scraping process. Once you’re done sanding (and the dust has settled), you’ll want to come back with joint compound and a putty knife to fill in any gouges, rough spots, and nail holes that might have opened up during the scraping and sanding. Let those patches dry for at least 30 minutes, and then give them a light sanding again with the pole sander to ensure that you have a smooth surface to paint later. That’s it! Isn’t it beautiful?…oh wait…cleanup. As you can see, when you’re done, you basically have your entire ceiling…on the floor. The Contractors Paper is a real time saver at this point if you’ve done it right. You just roll it up tight and put it in a garbage bag. We found that about 3 tight rolls will fit in a standard garbage bag. Here’s what the same corner of the master bedroom looked like after a couple coats of paint on the ceiling and the walls. Ahh…smooth ceilings. Perhaps it isn’t worth the effort for some, but as much as Amy and I hate popcorn ceilings, it was worth it.

Update: There is a LOT of information to be learned from the comments on this post, and while reading all of the comments would be great…it is a lot of reading. To help those of you coming to this resource for the first time, I’ve marked some of the more helpful comments with a little thumbs up symbol. It brightens my day to hear that I’ve helped someone remove another popcorn ceiling from the earth, but it makes me even happier to see those people passing on their tips and tricks to future visitors. This post wouldn’t be the same without your information. Thanks to all of you and best of luck! -Jason

Update #2 10/5/2006 - The comment response to this blog post has been simply amazing! With all of the contributions here, this simple webpage has become the single most exhaustive resource for popcorn ceiling removal. While it has been fun seeing a sense of community develop, comments on a blog are not the best medium for conversation and discussion. For that reason, I’ve setup a whole website dedicated to this subject: popcornforum.com.

I’ve started to go through the existing comments here, copying and pasting the questions and answers into the forum. I’ve put that task on hold for now though so that I can open the doors to the new site and get some real interaction going on. If you have any questions about popcorn ceiling removal, tips to share, stories to tell, please do this in the forum rather than here on the website. My goal is to eventually close the comments on this post and direct all interaction to the forum site. I hope that all you weekend warriors and DIYers out there find this new forum helpful and informative. Thank You! -Jason

Update #3 1/11/2007 - It’s been almost a year and a half since I posted this simple tutorial and its continued growth in popularity continues to amaze me. My wife and I aren’t home improvement gurus, we’re just regular first-time home owners who wanted to get rid of our popcorn. People keep thanking me for writing these instructions, but really, it’s all of you who deserve thanks. It’s the 200 (yes, 200) comments, tips, and stories that make this single page such a valuable resource to every potential popcorn scraper. As I’ve said before though, the comment list of a blog entry isn’t a very practical medium for dialog. So, as of today, comments are closed. If you have any wisdom, breakthroughs, or questions, please don’t let this keep you from sharing. The popcorn forum is open for guest posting, so you don’t even need to create a login. Just visit the category that best fits and click on “new topic” to start a discussion. Or, better yet, add a reply to an existing topic. With about 160 unique visitors per day to this one page, I really believe there are enough of you out there to make the popcorn forum into a great contextual community. Thanks for reading! - Jason

Update #4 11/5/2007 - The popcorn forum that I set up last year is still running smoothly and I plan to keep it going, but I’ve set up something brand new: Diyalogue.

Diyalogue is, as the logo implies, a social network for do-it-yourselfers. At this site, you can create a public profile, blog about your latest DIY projecs, share project pictures and videos and a whole lot more. I’m hoping this will become a fun and interactive community of weekend warriors and I’m assuming that if you’re here researching popcorn ceiling removal, that you fit that description. So check it out, create and account, upload some pictures, write a blog post, and meet your fellow DIYers.

Ames and I had a great move from Gainesville to Columbia! Everything between packing and closing when smooth, and although we’ve been working really hard on fixing the place up, we’re really happy with our first home. In fact, I wanted to spend my free time before work this morning finishing up my do-it-yourself post on removing popcorn ceilings, but I when I checked my gmail, I had over 100 comment spams to delete from mister aaa@aaa.com. If you have a Movable Type blog, you probably know him well…all he ever says is “Interesting!”, “WOW Nice Site!” I’ve had problems from him since before I moved to Dreamhost, but since then I haven’t been able to get MTBlacklist working to block him. Well, after deleting all those comments, I was pretty set on getting that fixed. Just as I figured, it was a permissions issue. After chmodding some mt files back to 755, I was up and running again with my spam filters, and just for good measure, I installed the latest version of Blacklist as well.

Since I was already in troubleshooting mode, I decided to tackle my Smart 404/Search problems. I kept getting “URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration” error whenever I tried to search or go to a non-existing url. I knew it all worked before, so I started snooping through my code and eventually figured out that Dreamhost has disabled the PHP option allow_url_fopen…which in turn kills file_get_contents. Argh! Fortunately, they’ve setup a workaround using curl.

I know Mike Davidson must have fixed this issue on his site because he’s a dreamhost user too, but I didn’t find anything on the related post or comments, so if you’ve followed his method too, here’s a fix:

In your 404.php page, change:

$full_page = file_get_contents($full_search_url);

To:

$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5; 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $full_search_url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$full_page = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

…and in your search.php page, change:

$search_results = implode('', file($link));

To:

$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5; 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $link);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$file_contents = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$search_results = implode('', array($file_contents));

How much fun is THAT!?!? I don’t think I know anyone who this applies to, but I thought I’d write it up anyway in case I ever need it again. Hopefully I’ll get that popcorn removal post up sometime next week, cause I know you’re ALL dying to get rid of the popcorn ceilings in your houses.