Popcorn. I hate popcorn!

So, like most houses built in the 80s, mine had lovely popcorn textured ceilings. The very first thing I did, starting the day after I bought it was lay down some plastic and start scraping the ceilings. I got a garden sprayer, filled it with water, and soaked the ceilings for about 15 minutes so it would loosen everything up. Then, using a 4" putty knife, standing on a ladder, I began to scrape.

It's tough to see from the pictures, but the popcorn is about 1/8 of an inch of raised texture on the ceiling. Once coated in water and soaked, it comes off in "sheets". If you get the timing right, you can remove a 10x10 section of it in about 20 minutes. It took me the whole dining room and half of the entry way to perfect the method, but I figured it out.

Here's the dining room after I finished...

Drywall dust is extremely fine and powdery. It gets everywhere. Plastic, rosin paper...doesn't matter how well you prepare the floors. It gets everywhere. I have a 12 gallon shop vac that I have running in the room to try to pull the dust. I have to empty it and clean the filter every 30 minutes or so to keep it pulling in the dust and debris.

All in all, I finished the whole downstairs in about 25 hours, working mostly evenings after work and all day the first weekend.

I'll post some more pics of the finished ceilings with the texture removed. I spent most of this weekend patching any spots in the ceiling where I went through the paper with some joint compound, then lightly sanding everything.