Day 1 of demolition! First task was tearing out all of the carpet and scraping off the popcorn from the ceilings. We were able to finish the upstairs and even sit and chat with 8 friends that stopped by to check the new place out.

We went back and forth on whether or not we wanted to scrape the popcorn off all of the ceilings being it covers the entire house so we knew it would be a lot of work. But in the end we decided that popcorn does date the house and being we are trying to modernize the home we decided that it needed to go. We are either going to go with a flat or knockdown textured ceiling. Knockdown is a little more intense than just a simple flat finish.

To scrape the popcorn off of the ceilings we just filled a spray bottle with water and sprayed and scraped. We used sheetrock mudding knifes for our scrapers. They say to let the water soak in for more than a few minutes before you scrape…but if you know me…I don’t have much patience, we sprayed and scraped quickly. There are lots of recipes out there for the perfect mixture to make the popcorn come off easily, but water did the trick just fine for us. I am sure glad we ended up doing this project first because it was a HUGE mess. We started with the master bedroom and forgot to tape off our windows, as you can see below, Whoops! Looks like we won’t be re-using those curtains. 🙂