Proceeding safely through ceiling repairs

I've experienced very few marital impasses in 15 concurrent years of co-habitation (with the same groom, no less) but recently we found the hole in our conjugal dyke. It turns out we're incompatible in one crucial area of personal taste: ceiling texture. He hates it. It has to go.

"It looks like sprayed-on cheese."

"I don't mind it, but it could use some paint."

"If you paint it, it'll look like painted cheese."

"It's just texture. What's with you and smooth ceilings?"

"A textured ceiling is a disguise for bad drywall work."

"Who's going to know the ceiling's got bad drywall work? It's textured!" (The clever student of human nature will recognize this as being a circular argument.)

"A smooth ceiling is a sign of good craftsmanship."

"The people who sleep in our guestroom won't care."

"How do you know they won't care?"

"They'll be drunk. That's always been the key to my decorating strategy."

This conversation went on, in fascinating depth, for weeks. Finally, I appeared to have won, when I produced evidence that many textured ceilings installed between 1945 and 1978 were full of asbestos particles. Scraping off the guestroom ceiling texture would mean releasing millions of airborne asbestos particles, which are a significant health hazard. So clearly the best option was to simply seal it with a shellac-based stain-blocking primer and then paint it. End of impasse, right?

Nope. Just getting started, really.

It turns out that you can send ceiling scrapings to special laboratories where smart, caring professionals will analyze your sample and tell you (or your husband) whether or not it's safe to scrape.

I made a call to Dave Verma, a professor at McMaster University and a key participant in getting asbestos banned from consumer products in 1980. Thanks to him, if your textured ceiling was applied after 1980, the likelihood that it contains asbestos is very low. "But until the late 1970s, even drywall compound had asbestos in it," Dave explained to me.

Dave now runs the Occupational and Environmental Health Laboratory at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, one of a handful of Canadian labs that is accredited by the American Industrial Hygiene Association to analyze samples for such contaminants as asbestos and organic solvents.

If you have a textured ceiling that needs repairs or might need to be removed altogether if your husband has huge texture issues, make sure you collect enough material (several spoonfuls of scrapings, double-bagged in Ziploc baggies), and send it to an accredited lab. The fee at the McMaster lab is $55, and the turnaround time is about 3 weeks. You can fill in a form online and mail your sample to the lab.

So. Now we've scraped and zipped and signed the form and sent away our sample, and we await our fate on tenterhooks.

In the meantime, I have some advice. If you've got a textured ceiling that has a few problems, here are some alternatives to scraping the whole ridiculous cheesy mess off and starting over from nothing and spitting tacks the whole time (which shall surely be my fate):

• To cover a previous patch job that looks obvious if not butt ugly, spread on some fresh ready-mixed "Popcorn" patching compound, feather the edges, then rough up the surface with a whisk to match the surrounding area.
• For discoloured areas or water stains on textured ceilings, spray on a light coating of undiluted chlorine bleach. Don't saturate the ceiling texture; it will get heavy, slough off and plunge to the ground in waffle-sized globs, like in Bartholomew and the Oobleck.
• If several bleach treatments fail to remove the stain, apply primer and a fresh coat of paint. But be careful. Ceiling texture is extremely absorbent. If you paint it with latex paint, it'll suck the water out of the paint, get soggy and plunge floorward faster than Uncle Woody after Thanksgiving dinner.
• Therefore, prime the ceiling first with shellac-based stain-blocking primer using a very thickly napped roller. Press very lightly with the roller or the texture will peel off like a beer bottle label on a hot summer night.
• In some hardware stores and home centers you can buy a pressurized can of ceiling texture, and simply spray it onto the patch area. PERSONAL TIP: When you depress the trigger on that baby it's like detonating a ricotta cheese bomb. Use with discretion.

Next week: The dramatic results of Mag's asbestos test.