Question:

Would a normal, sane person who had two schoolbooks halfway done, was trying to get them done before June, was planning on painting her bathroom, had plenty of other things to do, and a long list today in particular, decide to scrape the popcorn ceiling while she was at it? No, probably not, but I did. :) Plus the fact that I woke up with a sinus headache this morning!
What did you say? Yes, I am crazy. But if you're going to scrape a ceiling it only makes sense to do it before you get the walls all nicely painted.

All of the ceilings in our house have a textured finish, usually called "popcorn", though it's really more like cottage cheese...you know, the stuff that comes showering down if you bump the ceiling, or gets in your hair if it was your head that bumped the ceiling?...yeah, that's right, that stuff.
Well, it's removable...with one garden sprayer, one putty knife (or similar flat-bladed object), and a trashcan. And it would be a really good idea to cover all the surfaces with some sort of paper or plastic that you can just roll up and throw away...even, even, if it's a bathroom and you figure it will all come off the tile fine, so why bother when you can just scrape it all up with the help of a dustpan when you're done...wrong. It comes off, yes, but it's not so easy as you'd think. There were many points during the process that I wished we had a shop-vac. Thinking about it now though, it would probably work, but then it would all dry inside, leaving you with basically a drywalled shop-vac.
So if I ever do a ceiling again, I will put down something, even it's over tile. And of course I would cover carpet.

That's what it looked like during the scraping process, a layer about that thick or thicker over the whole bathroom. -->

And what it looked like after:












What you do is: you fill the sprayer with water, spray the ceiling, and start scraping...simple enough really...just a bit time-consuming when you start wiping up all the stuff.
It came off pretty well, best over the shower where it had gotten steamed plenty already, and worst over the light fixture where it had been baked.

So that's done. I'll need to do some spackling around the edge where the drywall tape's trying to come off. You can also see all these little spots where the drywall must have been gouged while putting it up... because it's filled in to make the ceiling smooth...hmph, incompetent drywallers... they did the seam neatly though, and I'm really happy about that. I can fix around the edges, but if there was going to be a big messy seam I'm not sure if we could fix it or not.
Now I just have to wait for it to dry all the way, prime and paint it, then I can get going on painting the walls...finally! I'm glad I did the ceiling though...it always collects dust and looks dirty, and I don't like that.

Surprisingly, I'm not tired after doing all that today! Maybe my arm will start hurting tomorrow, but it hasn't hurt so far, so maybe I'll be fine.