Covering Popcorn Ceiling with Plaster

Popcorn ceilings are ugly–or at least unfashionable. They make a house dated. We’ve wanted to get rid of ours ever since we moved in to our 1972 home. How? Scraping off the popcorn and re-plastering is one way, but our popcorn ceiling is painted and scraping didn’t work. Besides, we were worried about asbestos.

I’ve been thinking about covering popcorn ceiling with plaster ever since I plastered over wallpaper in our bathrooms. Covering popcorn ceiling with plaster I decided to try covering popcorn ceiling with plaster in small bathroom area. It worked beautifully! Eventually, I did our whole house. It is time consuming, but so are all the other methods of covering popcorn ceilings. Here is how to do it:

Joint Compound (Pre-Mixed, All Purpose or Lightweight)

4 to 6 inch Drywall Joint Knife

Tray or bucket

Stepladder

Plastic for covering floor and furniture

painter's tape or masking tape

Paper Towels and Water (for clean-up)

1. Preparation: Cover furniture and floor with plastic cloths. No matter how careful you are, you are bound to drop some globs of plaster as you work. These can be wiped up easily but are messy. You don’t want to try to get them out of carpet or a couch, so cover up or move it out of the way. Take off the covers of any vents in the room. This can be a good time to spray paint these and make them look new before you put them back.

2. Put your joint compound in a plastering tray or small bucket. Start in a corner of the room. Dip your knife into the joint compound and lift up a chunk (about ½ a cup).

3. Starting at the edge of the ceiling press the compound down and then drag the knife across the ceiling at about a 45 degree angle. Press enough compound in to cover the popcorn. Lift the knife and keep on pressing the compound down across the ceiling until it is all about ¼ inch thick. Some of the compound may drop across the sides and fall (which is why you needed to cover the floor!). As you do this more, you will get better at knowing how to move the knife to catch the dropping compound.

1. Keep on scooping up compound and pressing against the ceiling. Generally, it works to do a 2 foot by 2 foot section at a time. After you have pressed a couple of scoops onto the ceiling, you will probably want to go back over that section with your knife in order to smooth it and make sure that no section is too thick. Scrape the knife across the compound and move it to a section of ceiling that isn’t covered yet.

2. As you work with the compound, you will see that there are different types of ceilings you can make depending on how close you scrape the compound on the popcorn.

• Smooth Ceilings: This is a ceiling which has a very thin layer of popcorn. As you scrape the plaster across the popcorn, you press down hard and just barely cover the popcorn. It actually takes more time to do this sort of ceiling because you have to keep on scraping and pressing closely.
• Rough Ceilings: On these ceilings you press lots of plaster down and don't go back to re-scrape as often. I did several variations of these. Some look like waves of plaster, others are more subtle. Experiment to see what you like. The plaster can be re-worked for an hour or so before it starts to dry.

3. Finishing the Edges and moulding. The edges and corners of the ceiling will look a bit ragged unless you use the tip of the knife or a finger to smooth it (you can wear plastic gloves if the joint compound dries your skin). To smooth it with a plaster knife, I usually used a 1” knife and put it at about a 35 degree angle parallel to the wall and used the tip to smooth where the ceiling and wall met. In some cases I also used my index finger to do the same.

4. Ceiling Vents: Be careful not to plaster over the holes for the screws for your ceiling vents. Your vents will go back on easier if you do only a light layer of plaster around them. I used a 1” knife to make the areas around the vent go more smoothly.

5. Finishing: Let the ceiling dry about a week before trying to paint it. Actually, since it will dry white, you may not even need to paint. Before you paint, be sure to cover everything again because the paint will get into the ridges of the plaster and sometimes drop down on your floor. I like Behr paints because they tend to cover in one coat and are thick so they don’t drip. Using a paint roller with an extension rod can make the job much easier because you won’t need a ladder for most of the work. You can use painter’s tape between the ceiling and wall, but I like to use a good quality 1” brush instead. If you use something other than white on the ceiling, you may need to take a brush to get in some of the crevices where paint from the roller didn’t work.

• How Much Does it Cost?

Covering a popcorn ceiling with plaster using this method is probably one of the cheapest ways to get rid of popcorn. Joint compound is not expensive and neither are the tools. The amount of joint compound you use depends on how thick you apply it to a ceiling, but one 8’ by 10’ room uses about 4-5 boxes of 48 lb. joint compound. The tools and plastic covers are also inexpensive and can be reused. The biggest cost in this project is time and effort.

• How Long does it Take?

I worked by myself to do our house and it took about 8 hours of work for an 8’ x 10’ room. I was not able to work for eight hours straight at the work because it is hard to be pressing against the ceiling with plaster for too many hours at a time, but by taking breaks every hour or so, I was able to finish most rooms in one day, or sometimes two half-days. Doing a ceiling in a weekend is certainly a realistic goal. Doing a whole house in a weekend is not, unless you have a team of people.

• Can I do it?

I am a 50 year old female college professor and housewife. Although I have done a lot of remodeling projects in my own home, I’m not a professional. If I can do it, you probably can too! In fact, because my husband was busy on some outside gardening projects, I did all of the plastering of our ceilings by myself. Because I was doing the plastering while my kids were at school, I often had to set-up, plaster and then clean-up in about six hours. We do have tile floors, so I did not have to worry about carpet, but I was still amazed at how easy it was to change the look of our house with this one project. Our 1972 house no longer looks dated. Covering popcorn ceilings with plaster is probably the DYI project I think changed our house the most.

• What else do I need to know?

Covering a popcorn ceiling with plaster may not work on every popcorn ceiling. Before you attempt to do a whole room, I recommend starting in an inconspicuous place, like a closet. I did a section in our garage first, then a small bathroom. I let the whole thing dry for a week, and then painted it. I was worried the plaster might fall off, so I waited several months, letting the bathroom get plenty of use and humidity before I started doing the other ceilings in the house. You might be tempted to go out and buy the entire compound for the house at once, but I found that fresh joint compound was easier to use, so I bought just one room at a time. I did use some compound that I’d opened and then stored for a while, but it is much harder to get it to smooth out.