Popcorn Ceiling Removal in Charlotte, NC

Why people finally do it

Popcorn ceilings date a house faster than almost anything else inside it, they trap dust, they're impossible to touch up, and they make every ceiling repair obvious. Removing it is one of the few changes that makes a whole room read as updated without moving a single wall.

What removal actually involves

• Everything gets covered. Floors, furniture, doorways and vents. This is a genuinely messy job done cleanly, and the difference is entirely in the prep.
• Scrape. The texture is wetted and scraped down to the drywall.
• Repair. Scraping reveals whatever the texture was hiding — bad seams, old patches, nail pops. These get fixed now, while the ceiling is open.
• Skim coat and sand. One or more coats of compound to get a genuinely flat surface, then sanded.
• Prime and paint. Fresh ceiling paint over the whole ceiling, edge to edge.

The asbestos question — read this part

Popcorn texture applied before roughly the mid-1980s can contain asbestos. If your house is from that era and the ceiling has never been redone, it should be tested before anyone scrapes it, including us. Testing is inexpensive and it is not something to skip or guess at. If a test comes back positive, the removal is a job for a licensed asbestos abatement contractor, not a drywall crew — we'll tell you that plainly and we won't touch it.

For newer construction, or a ceiling that's already been tested clean, we can go straight to work.

Cover it instead?

On some ceilings, skim-coating straight over the texture or covering with a new layer of drywall is faster and less disruptive than scraping. It depends on how heavy the texture is and how flat the ceiling is underneath. We'll tell you which approach makes sense for your ceiling rather than defaulting to whichever one we'd rather do.