Popcorn Ceilings, Long Beach
Sprayed acoustic ceilings put up before about 1980 may contain asbestos, and nobody can tell by looking. We start with a sample and a laboratory result, and only then talk about scraping, skimming or simply painting it.
What we find above the light fixture, and what it takes to make a ceiling flat again.
September 1, 2026
Somebody buys a house east of the traffic circle, walks in, looks up, and the ceiling is covered in that sprayed white texture everyone calls popcorn. Within a week we get the call. It is nearly always the same two sentences: we want it gone, and someone told us it might have asbestos in it.
Both halves of that are worth slowing down on, because the order you do things in matters more than the work itself. This is how we approach a textured ceiling in a Long Beach house, what the age of the building actually tells you, what removal genuinely involves once the fun part is over, and the cases where the right answer is to leave the ceiling exactly where it is and paint it.
Spray applied acoustic texture was not a styling decision. It was a labor saving one.
A flat drywall ceiling has to be taped, coated, sanded and skimmed to a finished plane, and any wave in the framing or any joint that was not feathered far enough shows up the moment afternoon light comes across it at an angle. That is slow, skilled work. Spraying a heavy texture over the same ceiling hides all of it, deadens sound a little, and takes an afternoon.
So through the post-war building boom, which in this part of the city means most of the tract housing east of Redondo and out toward Lakewood, ceilings got sprayed as standard. Nobody chose it. It came with the house.
That history is also why removal is more work than people expect. When you scrape the texture off, you are not revealing a finished ceiling. You are revealing the unfinished one the texture was sprayed on to hide.
Here is the part people want a clean answer to, and the honest answer is that there is not one without a test.
Some spray applied ceiling texture manufactured through the middle of the last century contained asbestos fibers. It was added because it worked, giving the material body and fire resistance. Use declined through the nineteen seventies as the health picture became clear, but stock that had already been made kept being sold and sprayed for a period after that. That is why you hear the cutoff quoted as nineteen seventy eight, or nineteen eighty, or the mid eighties depending on who is talking. None of those dates is a law of physics. They are rules of thumb about probability.
What that means in practice:
You cannot tell by looking. Not by the pattern, not by the color, not by how hard it is. Anyone who tells you they can identify it by eye is guessing, and it is a strange thing to guess about when the alternative is so cheap.
A small area is misted with water so nothing goes airborne, a piece of the texture roughly the size of a coin is cut out with a blade into a sealed bag, and the bag goes to a laboratory that analyzes the fibers under a microscope. Because texture was often applied in more than one pass, more than one sample is usually taken from different parts of the ceiling.
The result comes back in days, not weeks. It says either that no asbestos was detected or that it was, and if it was, roughly how much and in what form.
The patch left behind is smaller than a business card. We fill it whatever the result turns out to be.
Then the ceiling does not get scraped by a painting crew, and it does not get scraped by you on a Saturday with a garden sprayer and a mask from the hardware store.
Removing asbestos containing material is regulated work. It calls for containment of the space, negative air pressure so nothing migrates into the rest of the house, trained crews, and waste that is bagged, labeled and taken to a facility that accepts it. That is an abatement contractor’s trade, and it is a different business from ours. We hand over names, we talk to whoever you pick, and we come back afterwards to prime, skim and paint the surface they leave behind.
There is also a perfectly reasonable third option, which is to do nothing. Undisturbed material sitting on a ceiling behind a coat of paint is not the hazard. Grinding it, sanding it, scraping it dry or drilling through it is. Sealing an intact ceiling and leaving it alone is a legitimate decision and not a cop out, and plenty of owners land there once they have the numbers in front of them.
A negative result changes the risk profile. It does not change the method much, because dry scraping any ceiling is a bad idea regardless. It fills the house with fine particles, it is harder physical work, and it tears the drywall face more.
So the room comes first. Furniture out where it can go, sheeted where it cannot. Floors covered and taped at the edges, walls papered up to the ceiling line, fixtures and ceiling fans dropped and bagged, vents sealed. Ceiling work rains on everything below it and there is no such thing as a tidy scrape.
Then the ceiling is misted in sections with a pump sprayer and given a few minutes. The water works through the texture and softens the adhesive, and a wide flexible blade lifts it off in wet sheets that fall onto the plastic instead of hanging in the air. There is a window there. Too little water and it fights you. Too much and the paper face of the board goes soft and tears, which turns a scrape into a repair.
A ceiling that has already been painted is the awkward case. The paint film seals the texture and stops the water getting in, so the material comes off in stubborn chips if it comes off at all. Sometimes it can be scored first. Sometimes the sensible answer is to board over the whole thing with new drywall and finish that instead.
Scraping is a day. Making the ceiling flat is the rest of the week.
Underneath the texture is a ceiling nobody ever intended to be seen. Taped joints stand proud, fastener heads leave dimples in rows across the framing lines, old repairs are there in whatever state somebody left them, and there is usually a film of adhesive residue.
Getting that to a flat plane takes two or three thin skim coats of joint compound, applied wide, allowed to dry properly and sanded back between passes. Thin coats, not one heavy one, because a heavy coat shrinks and cracks as it dries and you sand off most of it anyway.
Then primer, because bare compound and old drywall paper absorb finish paint at completely different rates and an unprimed ceiling shows every skimmed area as a shadow. Then two coats of flat ceiling paint. Flat every time, because sheen on a ceiling is a spotlight aimed at every imperfection you just spent three days reducing.
Drying is the schedule, and near the water the drying is slower than the bucket says.
A gray morning with the marine layer sitting over the city keeps a cool house humid well past sunrise. Compound that feels dry to the back of your hand can still be soft underneath, and sanding it at that point tears the surface and leaves a fuzzy finish that has to be recoated. So we sand when it is actually dry, which in June can mean the ceiling gets its next coat in the afternoon rather than first thing.
Salt in the air matters more on the outside of a house than the inside, but the damp does reach interior ceilings in the older bungalows near the harbor, particularly in rooms that do not get direct sun. Those are also the houses most likely to have a stain we should talk about before painting.
Not every popcorn ceiling should come down, and we say so often enough that it is worth putting in writing.
If the texture is sound, if there is no water staining, and if the only reason for removal is that the finish looks dated, then sealing and repainting it costs a fraction of removal, takes a day, and disturbs nothing. A well painted textured ceiling in a flat white reads as a finish rather than as neglect, especially once the walls around it are fresh.
Removal makes sense when the ceiling is already damaged, when a leak has to be opened up anyway, when a room is being renovated to the studs, or when you simply want a flat ceiling badly enough to pay for it and can live in the house while it happens. Those are all good reasons. Being told at a dinner party that popcorn ceilings are out is not.
One caution if you choose to paint and keep. A painted textured ceiling is significantly harder to remove later. If there is any real chance you will strip it in the next few years, strip it before you paint it.
If you are looking up at a textured ceiling in Long Beach and wondering what to do about it, the first fact to gather is not a quote. It is the year the house was built, and whether the ceiling has ever been touched since.
That decides whether the next step is a sample and a few days of waiting or a straightforward conversation about scraping. Everything else follows from it.
Call Iedafrica at (562) 981-8366.
Iedafrica works on ceilings in Long Beach. Textured ones mostly, the sprayed white stuff that goes by popcorn, cottage cheese or acoustic depending on who is describing it. Some of those ceilings come down. Some get skimmed flat. A fair number are best left exactly where they are and repainted, and we will tell you when yours is one of those.
The first question is never how it looks. It is when the house was built and when that ceiling last had anything done to it. Spray applied acoustic texture from the middle of the last century sometimes contained asbestos, and manufacturers kept using up existing stock into the late nineteen seventies, so anything from before about 1980 is treated as suspect until a laboratory says otherwise. That is not us being dramatic. It is the only responsible way to open a bag of scrapings in an occupied house.
Testing is cheap and quick. A small sample is collected wet, sealed, and sent to a laboratory that looks at the fibers under a microscope. The result comes back in a few days and it is either negative, in which case the job is ordinary messy ceiling work, or it is positive, in which case removal is regulated work for an abatement contractor and not for a painting crew. We are painters. We do the part before and the part after, and we say so plainly rather than quoting you a scrape and hoping.
Most of our ceiling work sits in the post-war tract housing east of the traffic circle and the mid-century flat roof homes, with the older bungalows adding their own complications.
Call (562) 981-8366 and lead with the year the house was built. That one number decides whether the next step is a quote or a sample.
Six things we do to ceilings, in roughly the order they happen. Which of them apply to your house depends on what the sample says and how flat you want the result.
A small piece of texture is misted, cut out with a blade into a sealed bag, and sent for analysis. The patch it leaves is smaller than a business card and gets filled at the end. You get the laboratory report itself, not our summary of it.
Where the result is negative, the ceiling is misted in sections, given a few minutes to soften, and taken off with a wide flexible blade onto plastic. Furniture out or sheeted, floors covered and taped, light fixtures dropped and bagged, walls papered to the ceiling line.
Scraping alone leaves a rough surface with the old spray adhesive and every taped joint showing through. A flat ceiling takes two or three thin skim coats of compound, sanded between, which is where most of the labor in this job actually sits.
Not everyone wants flat. If a ceiling is being patched rather than stripped, or you would rather have a light orange peel or knockdown than a dead flat plane, we match the existing pattern by hand and by spray so the repair does not read as a repair.
A sound textured ceiling can be sealed and painted rather than removed. It is sprayed or rolled with a long nap, never brushed hard, because pressure is what dislodges texture. Cheaper, far less disruptive, and the honest answer in plenty of houses.
Coastal humidity and a slow roof leak leave a tea colored ring that bleeds through ordinary paint no matter how many coats go on. Those get a stain blocking primer over the dried out area, not another coat of ceiling white and a hope.
Per room, for a standard bedroom or living room ceiling in a single story home. Testing is billed separately and at cost, because we do not want anyone deciding to skip it. A firm number goes in writing after we have seen the ceiling and read the report.
Tell us the year the house was built and what the ceiling looks like now. If it is old enough to matter, the next step is a sample and a few days of waiting, not a crew and a spray bottle. If it is not, we will say so and quote the work. Either way you get the laboratory report and a written scope before anyone puts plastic on your floor.
Call (562) 981-8366