Ceilings hung, repaired and taken back to flat

It might, if the house was sprayed before the early eighties, and it has to be tested before anybody scrapes it. A lab test on a small sample is cheap and takes a few days. If it comes back positive the removal is licensed abatement work and not ours, and hanging over it is often the sensible answer instead.

A plain bedroom lid is a day to strip or board and two to three days to tape, coat and sand, because each coat has to dry before the next. Popcorn removal adds the wetting and scraping day at the front, and a Level 5 skim adds one at the back, so most single ceilings run three to five days.

More than any other job in the trade, which is why the room gets emptied and sheeted first. Plaster and lath come down in dust and lumps, doorways are zipped, and the floor is covered wall to wall. We vacuum before leaving, but plan to keep the room shut for the days we are in it.

Because a ceiling is fighting gravity and a wall is not. Five-eighths is stiff enough to stay flat between joists at twenty-four-inch centers, where half-inch will slowly dish between them and show a shadow at every joint. Half-inch is only used overhead on short runs at sixteen-inch centers.

Not until we know where the water came from and whether anything above is still wet. We open a small hole and take a meter reading, and if it is live the roof or the pipe is somebody else's first job. Painting a stain out with a blocking primer hides it, and it comes back the moment the ceiling is wet again.

We cut and frame the openings, and an electrician does the wiring. An open ceiling is the cheap moment for both, so it is worth having them booked to come between us taking it down and us hanging it back. Tell us the layout at the measure and the framing goes in to suit it rather than being cut afterwards.

Treat it as urgent. A bow in an old plaster lid means the keys have broken off the lath over an area much larger than the bow, and that comes down as a slab rather than as crumbs. Keep people out from under it, do not push at it, and we will sound it and tell you whether it is a section or the whole ceiling.

With staging built inside the space rather than off a ladder, slower to set up and safer to work from. A stairwell needs a platform bridging the flight, and a vaulted room needs it moved for each coat. It is a real part of the price, so it is named on the quote instead of appearing as a day nobody expected.

Out of the room if at all possible, because dust from a ceiling falls on everything in it. If something cannot be moved it gets pushed to the middle and wrapped, though that costs time on every visit and makes the sanding slower. We will tell you at the measure which of the two your room is.

We prime it, and that is included. A primed ceiling is what a decorator wants to be given, and primer is also the coat that shows up any joint needing one more pass, so what you are handed has already been checked. We do not paint the finish coats, and we will say when the surface is ready for them.

Yes, and it is most of what we do overhead. The wall angle gets taped and coated as part of the ceiling, so expect a band a few inches down the wall to need repainting where the new tape lands. If the walls are papered or in a color you cannot match, say so first and we will keep the line as tight as possible.

Because every stage of it is slower. The board is heavier and wants a lift or a second pair of hands, compound sags off a blade held upward so the coats go on thinner and there are more of them, and sanding is done looking up with dust falling on the whole room. Call it half again the labor per square foot.