The previous owners (known as Larry, Moe, & Curly around here), masters of home maintenance that they were, sprayed the walls with generic off-white prior to sale and didn’t mask. There’s a border of antique-off-white-sort-of-beige around all the edges where ceiling meets wall. The rest of the popcorn is a much lighter shade of almost-white.
I’d like to repaint. I had planned on using an extra-fuzzy roller & just painting normally. I’ve since had a “professional painter” (he works for a subcontractor on new home contruction) tell me that if the popcorn absorbs too much paint, it’ll get soggy and fall off in large wet chunks.
He recommends I spray. I know nothing about spray painting (other than the rumours that the Wagner powerpainter sucks).
I don’t know about the painting, but if you want to remove the popcorn, it’s very easy. Just spray it with water and scrape it off. It helps to attach a shallow box to the scraper in order to catch the popcorn. You can do a room in less than an hour.
Yes, the popcorn can start to fall if it gets too wet. But if it is in good shape, you may be able to roll it with a deep fuzzy roller.
My experience, on high ceilings with popcorn (my house) was that a roller worked, and so did I. I ended up buying a professional spray gun. Not cheap, and requires that you need to cover or move everything in the room. If you don’t want the walls the same color of the ceiling, buy a masking gun (allows you to apply roll/craft type paper w/tape on it) Also, buy a roll of plastic for ‘tarps’.
I did not try to wash the ceiling, really can’t do that with a popcorn ceiling. I broomed it off, knocking the dust and crumbleys off first. Then I sprayed it.
A pro paint gun, typically sucks paint from a 5 gal bucket. I bought an attachment that is a gallon or so bucket that fits ontop of the pump. That allows it to gravity feed into the pump. For me, a good solution.
The worst part about spraying is starting and finishing up. You will need to cover everything, or move it. Also, you will need to clean the spray gun, 50± of hose and what not. It’s a much bigger mess than rolling. But all in all much faster.
My suggestion is that you rent an air sprayer at a home improvement store and do it that way. It is really messy but in the long run in will save a lot of hassle and time.
Also check out www.doityourself.com and read the threads there for more suggestions.
Spray. Spray. Spray. Rolling it will look like hell.
My dad is a painting contractor, and I have helped him paint many a house (mine and others).
Consider paying someone else to spray it for you if you’ve never done it. If you do it yourself, make sure that you have covered everything with tarps (including the floor), also cover all doorways with tarps, and wear a hood and mask to keep the paint off of your head and out of your mouth and eyes.
Really, it’s a hassle to do correctly. Get someone to do it for you.
I’ve found that just about anything works. I’ve taken the little popcorn balls down quickly, by just using my stilts, and scraping with a wide 12" blade. I imagine wetting it probably works fine too. After I scraped it, I would then just shoot another batch of texture. You can shoot over the original texture, but it leaves too much of a dense look to me. Not sure about Wagner, but airless sprayers do work great if you want to paint it. Naturally, not for shooting texture ceilings. Those that own one were generally fanatical about keeping the little orifices clean, and seemed to do just fine as long as they had that attitude. Assuming you just want to paint it, you’ll get some popcorn balls coming off if you roll it initially, but after it dries, I seriously doubt it will be coming off after that. I lived in a house for 17 years after I painted over the acoustical ceiling, and I don’t recall this ever being a problem.
I’ve got a policy to never pay somebody to do what I can mess-up for myself. I’m trusting all of you - I’ve placed a bid on a eBay airless paint-sprayer.
I think 1985 is safe. I’m actually not aware of ceilings containing asbestos, since they are a gypsum product. But at one time they made a lot of products of asbestos. Still don’t know why they would have used that as a ceiling texture though.
I’ve never heard of ceiling texture containing asbestos. Fireproof ceiling tile used to be asbestos based but that would probably date at least back to the 70’s and probably even earlier.
As a former Asbestos remover I will say that Yes a “popcorn” ceiling can have asbestos in it. I cannot remember doing a removal on a house or building that contained asbestos which had been built since the early seventies.
NoClueBoy You beat me to it. I used this type of roller on my moms house.