Hanging Items from Popcorn Ceiling in Rental – Tips and Techniques

My wife and I just finished doing this last month. Here's the process we took:

Before you start, check to make sure you don't have asbestos in the popcorn. If your house is newer construction, you don't have to worry about this, but if it's older, you may want to scrape a bit off the ceiling and send it to a lab for testing. If it comes back positive, I would have professionals handle it. Otherwise:

1. Cover everything you don't want to get gross and disgusting.
2. Turn off breaker for the lights and remove fixtures.
3. Use a spray bottle or a garden sprayer to wet 5' by 5' sections of ceiling with water. Be careful not to oversaturate it and damage the drywall.
4. Scrape off popcorn with a 6" or 12" taping knife, whichever you find easier to handle.
5. Sand any spots you missed that are still rough. (For the most part, everything comes off smooth.)
6. Apply mud liberally to any gouges you made. Most spots I had to go over were at the seams of the drywall.
7. Sand again.
8. Repeat 6 and 7 if you're OCD like me. If you want to get everything super smooth, shine a flashlight or work light parallel with the ceiling to find raised/gouged areas.
9. Wipe down the ceiling to get rid of any sanding dust.
10. Prime
11. Paint with 2 coats of ceiling paint.
12. Throw away drop cloths
13. Lie on the floor and stare at your new smooth ceilings :)

One bit of advice: You're going to make A LOT of dust, and it will get all over everything in your house that isn't covered. We did the whole process before we moved in, so we only had to wipe down the walls and floors.

After you're all done, you'll probably want to change your air filter as well.

I've had similiar issues and have re-applied the popcorn to good results since my house has popcorn ceilings. You can certainly scrape off the popcorn for the entire ceiling and either re-apply it or smooth it out, but now the scope of the fix has increased.

Basically most home improvement stores sell popcorn spray in a can. @Tester101 has provided a link to one such product.

I can tell you from past experience that spraying on popcorn is not like spraying on paint.

1. Tape off and cover surrounding area. This is a must as the overspray goes everywhere.
2. Use short controlled bursts. I usually go forward, look at the results and then go back until the desired texture is achieved.
3. Usually the product expels pretty quickly and somewhat uncontrollably from the can, so you might want to try a test run on a piece of plywood or other large flat surface to get the hang of it before tackling the actual area.
4. I repaint the entire ceiling with flat ceiling paint after the fix is applied to make the finish uniform.

After that it hard to spot and will not be easily noticable unless you are actually looking for it.

Here's a picture of a patch job. The patch is right on the corner that juts out slightly. It came out pretty well. Nobody ever notices it. The texture is slightly different, but I think if I practiced more before applying I could have matched the texture a little better.