How to remove old textured finish from a ceiling

If you have a ceiling like the one on the picture below – full of cracks and covered with texture – then you must be wondering how you can make it look nice in a quick and relatively inexpensive way. Removing the texture finish, filling the cracks and applying few layers of skim coat can give totally different look to your ceiling.

Picture N1

Here is how the process goes:

First, you need to scrape down the ugly textured finish from the ceiling. Use a hand scraper and 3-5 scraper blades for a medium size ceiling. In most of the cases texture comes down very easily.

Don’t forget to use safety glasses, safety goggles and a mask for entire time of scraping.

After you are done with scraping, most likely you will see a lot of cracks hidden by the texture finish. These cracks need to be fixed in order to make the ceiling solid and strong. For that purpose, open the cracks by the same scraper you used for scraping the texture. Hold it the way so you can widen the cracks a little bit for entire length of a crack; make it wide enough for plaster mix can go all the way to the bottom of a crack later on.

Once cracks are widened they need to be fixed by screws and washers in order to avoid future cracking of the ceiling. For screws and washer it is better to make some space along the cracks so when screws and washers are in place they could be covered easily by the plaster at the same time when filling the gaps.

After you put screws and washers along the cracks, it is highly recommended to apply bonding material called “plaster weld” – pink material that can be seen on the picture N2 applied on the ceiling – on entire area of the ceiling. Plaster Weld comes in gallons and can be applied on damaged areas whether on a ceiling or on walls. It can be applied just like paint, with a brush and a roller.

Picture N2

Let plaster weld dry completely and start filling cracks with the mix of plaster and cement. After the material used in cracks is dry, apply stripes of fiberglass screen on top of cracks to make them even less likely to crack again in the future.

Next, ceiling needs to be skim coated 1 to 3 times depending on how uneven it is. Last 2 layers of skim coat should be done with All Purpose Joint Compound, this way ceiling will look nice and smooth.

After the last coat of compound is sanded it is ready to be painted. We recommend using two layers of flat finish paint. First layer needs to be thin (just add some water to the paint) so it can penetrate the surface. Second coat should be used without adding water.

As you can see on the picture N3, restored and painted ceiling looks even and smooth; giving, as we promised, totally different look to your room.

Picture N3