Masking Off

To remove the popcorn ceiling, you will need to completely mask of anything that you do not want popcorn texture getting on to.  This basically means everything from walls all the way down to your floors.  If you have furniture in the room, be prepared to take an extra long time to mask everything off, as furniture makes the process just a little bit more difficult.  My advice to you would be to move the furniture out of the room if you can.  Start by masking off the floors with plastic and going at least 1 foot up onto the wall.  Use blue painters tape as it is supposed to not tear off any paint.  However in my experience, we do still see some paint peels on occasion.  You can put rosin paper down after the plastic because plastic is very slick when it gets wet.  If you feel comfortable putting plastic over your light sockets, please do so as you will be working with water in most cases to remove the popcorn.  The next step is to mask off the walls lining the top with blue tape and then hanging a sheet of plastic over that so you don’t get any popcorn on the walls.  If  you have to use a staple gun just to make sure everything stays up when removing the popcorn, then do it.  Now comes your fixtures,  mask off all light fixtures and fans or drop their caps down if you can.  This will make the clean up easier and if you ever switch out fixtures if you have the large ones, you will not be left with any popcorn that wasn’t removed.  Take out your ceiling vents if you have them for the same reason.  If you have a return air vent be sure to turn off the ac as this will suck a bunch of dust in your filter.