Redo textured ceiling. How hard?

[Tom Eller]

Hi,

I'm thinking of buying a house, with one minor (but very annoying) problem. It looks like the owners of the house deceided to texture the ceiling themselves. Normal textured ceiling is not perfect I know but this is really bad. Instead of having the "sponge" marks side by side or evenly spaced these are sometimes 3" sometimes 8" apart. And the amount of plaster that hangs down in places is more than 1 1/2", and others barely even noticable that they sponged the spot.

Is this something I could redo myself? Or would I just make it worse. Anybody ever done it before? I've done drywall walls but never textured anything before.

I'm expecting a huge mess from sanding off what's already there. Thought I'd try the create a room using the plastic sheets and put the shopvac inside to suck up the dust. Saw something similar on the DIY channel.

I'm going to call a couple drywall contracters and see what they'd charge to do it, anybody know off hand what the last ceiling they had textured cost per sq ft?

I'm in Columbus OH if anybody is curious.

Thanks for your ideas. This newsgroup is pretty entertaining to read.

Tom

[Art]

If they did it themselves maybe they had good quality flat ceilings before and a good finishing guy could remove the crud and remake the ceilings flat.

[Tom Eller]

doh, now why didnt I think of that. Good idea.

Thanks!

[Benign Vanilla]

A few years back we had a ceiling damaged by an ice dam. It was textured. The drywall contractor simply scraped it off with a putty knife. Once he got rolling it all came off in a few minutes. It's much easier to scrape then to sand.

-- BV.

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[edee em]

Remember to wet it down first, before scraping...