When I moved into my house in 1975 all the ceilings were done with polystyrene type materia.It was about the same width as a roll of wallpaper and must have came in rolls. When you look up at it looks like all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and it is very hard to paint if ceiling gets dirty from smoke. Does anyone know the name of this material? I would like to remove it but am afraid to start . Has anyone ever removed this and is it hard to remove. There is also polystyrene? coving round the walls as well.
Our bungalow when we moved in had polystyrene coving I have removed it from all but one room so far. A good scraper easily removes the coving the harder task is removing the adhesive. With judicious water spraying I found out that the adhesive will scrape off but it needs a bit of time spent doing it.
I cannot guess what the ceiling polystyrene is adhered with but it sounds like the stuff that was pasted on walls before over - papering in an effort to ?insulate? the walls, if it is then likely it will have been stuck on with wallpaper paste.
If you can get through the layers of paint, I suspect acetone would dissolve it, but still leave a mess such that you'd want to get it skimmed or overboard it with more plasterboard.
Was this polystyrene from a previous owner or was your house a new build? Polystyrene tiles and "On a Roll" were popular in the 70s/80s often in an attempt to hide cracked ceilings.
It is easy to remove with a scraper but what may be more difficult is the fixing material. With luck, a polystyrene roll was probably stuck to the ceiling with a strong wall-paper paste and after scraping off the polystyrene repeated washing with water and sponge will remove the paste Tiles are often struck down with a polystyrene tile "cement" which on some ceiling surfaces can also be scraped off fairly easily - but with a lot more effort. As others have said the cement may also be water soluble.
While it is a good idea to remove polystyrene from a ceiling as it is a problem if you have a fire consider also in what condition the ceiling may be underneath the polystyrene. To get a decent ceiling surface you may have to get it skimmed or over-boarded and skimmed. If the latter probably over-board the polystyrene.
Where polystyrene is easy to get off I have used a 4 inch scraper
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but for more difficult installations a smaller scraper can work better, especially when after removing the polystyrene the "cement" remains stuck to the ceiling.
No need for any chemicals - you will be able to scrape it off irrespective of top levels of paint. Polystyrene is so weak that mechanical means that it should come off easily. The trick is to get a small area cleared first so that you can run your scraper against the original surface of the ceiling - underneath the polystyrene layer.
We had a number of artex ceilings here that we've had overboarded and skimmed. We had the picture rails restored too. Then, wall colour up to the PR, gloss-white the PR, and matt white the wall above and new ceiling. Looks much better.
It is almost certainly expanded polystyrene and at that vintage entirely without any kind of fire inhibitor in it. Removing it is sensible.
It has almost no physical strength and will shed small spheres everywhere at the slightest provocation. You will find out why they covered the ceiling with it afterwards probably loads of cracks in the old plaster. Replastering a ceiling well is a job for experts - DIY amateurs will struggle to make it stay up.
I have it on some outside walls. It was just put there with ordinary thick paste at the time. There was also some wall and ceiling paper made from it, but thinner, not recall the name, Novamura or something like it. It absorbs paint like a sponge though. Brian
Yes, I remember seeing somebody show it was not flamable, it has some stuff in it that makes it kind of shrivel up and end up like little ball bearings, but certainly we put it up with thick wallpaper paste and its still up now. Brian
+1. 3 inch or wider flexible "filling blade" should make light work of it. (The old fashioned type with a central handle is better than the modern rectangular sort).
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