Popcorn Ceiling Repair

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Popcorn ceiling repair is one of those things that DIYers and Home-owners alike have a hard time with. You tube and the internet can be very encouraging and motivating to take matters into your own hands.

Unfortunately, sometimes this leaves you with a bit of a mess, kind of like the time we tried spraying vinegar and water on our windshield to get rid of the ice and only ended up with more ice. Some guy in Florida is probably laughing about this clever little “life-hack” he conjured up and posted.

Stipple in a can from Home Depot

You may have seen that you can buy popcorn ceiling spray, or stipple ceiling spray in a can at home-depot and tackle this yourself. Don’t do it! Or, do it and keep our number handy. This would be the equivalent or worse than an auto body shop trying to match your car paint with a can of spray paint from the dollar store. Not only does the can give you very little control over the dispersement and range of the spray, it also doesn’t offer different nozzles as a regular spraying machine would. I can speak for all Ottawa Drywallers when I say, we don't use it.

We’ve done hundreds of these repairs and over half of them are ones were we have to scrape the home-owners attempt off. While there’s nothing wrong with giving things a try, if you value your time and don’t enjoy doing this kind of thing even if it doesn’t turn out, we suggest you save yourself a little frustration and spend that time with your family instead.

How does PatchBoyz repair Popcorn Ceilings?

Being in Ottawa, Toronto and other cities, we have to have our process down-pat to consistently deliver results that people are happy with. So here we are:

1. Setup floor protection
2. Setup containment
3. Scrape stipple perimeter of the damage by 1-3ft (yes, that much)
4. Repair the drywall (if needed)
   1. Install backing
   2. Cut the drywall opening square
   3. Install a new square of drywall using Drywall screws (important)
5. Tape all seams
6. Apply 2- 3 coats of mud
7. Sand (if necessary) using dust extractor
8. Apply primer
9. Mix paint and stipple in hopper & gun
10. Select proper spray nozzle
11. Spray the mixture onto the ceiling to Complete the Popcorn Ceiling Patch
12. Inspect for quality then clean up

Our clients are often shocked by the amount of equipment that is bought in for “a simple patch”. We can be caught lugging in air movers, lights, dehumidifiers, mudding tools, dust extractors, electric sanders, ladders, mixing buckets, mixing drills, protective equipment for the home and our person, soap to mix into the mud, water… The list goes on. This has turned into quite a science in order to execute this efficiently and eliminate deficiencies.

If popcorn ceilings are so hard to fix, why do they exist?

That’s a good question.

While we have a full article about that, we’ll give you the quick and dirty summary of it all. Mudding or Taping as it is also called, is very imperfect and requires many coats and sanding to get a nice finish product. It’s all about how the light hits the wall or ceiling and which direction shadows are cast. In the morning, the shadows in a home are casted in a certain direction, in the evening, yep, you guessed it. They are cast a different way. Not necessarily the exact opposite because the earth rotates around the sun but also spins on its own axis. Not only this, but you may not have windows in the exact same shape, size and position at the other end of your house. This is why tapers or painters do “Prime-Checks”. Essentially, a light is held close to the freshly prime drywall to cast shadows from different directions, to make sure that a good job was done independent of where the sun and artificial lighting will come from.

But why do Popcorn ceilings exist?

Okay, okay, we’re getting to that. Even though taping companies do their best to deliver a perfect product, they can’t come back at every hour of the day, and things can be missed during prime check. Can you imagine staring at white walls all day? You’d be likely to miss things too.

Builders got tired of home-owners calling them back about deficiencies and having to try and get the taping company to fix its mistakes. That’s when the application of stipple ceilings or popcorn ceilings came to surface. They could now tape the seams, apply one coat of mud, and if they were good enough, they could skip the extra coats and even sometimes the sanding, and instead just spray the ceiling.

Not only that, but because companies like Minto, Mattamy and Cardel homes understand how much people hate popcorn ceilings (YES, HATE!), they can charge a premium to the Stipple removal and deliver the home with flat ceilings. We’ve seen the sticker price on this up-sell on a typical 2000 square foot home to be an extra $25,000.00

The additional cost to them is less than $5000. So this is a big money maker for them, of course.

So now that you’re an expert on Popcorn ceilings and how to remove them… We invite you to give us a call to see if we can help you repair your popcorn ceilings or fix some cracks in them caused by setting of the foundation, over time.