Purchasing real estate is a big deal. It’s common to ask questions such as “Did I get a good deal?” and “Will I be happy in this area?”. The questions you shouldn’t have to ask are “Will my new home negatively affect my health?” and “Will the ceiling texture affect the sale price if I ever decide to resell?”.
This new condo owner on Commercial Drive took action to avoid these questions by calling us at RemoveCeilingTexture.com to have a look at her dingy ceilings.
As with most textured ceilings, this one was covered with dust and even cobwebs. The texture was also cracked along the edges of the walls. We assured her that texture removal would give the condo a fresh look and began our work.
You can see from the before and after photos that the result just a few days later was clean, smooth ceilings. Now the homeowner can relax in her new condo and ask herself “Where will my sofa look best?” instead of worrying about the state of her ceilings.
Ceiling texture can crack around the wallsDirty ceiling texture in the kitchenHallway appears brighter after removing the ceiling textureLiving room of Commercial Drive condo gets a new look by removing the ceiling texture
Thinking about doing something about those ugly ceilings? Click here to get in touch with us!
The focus of this article is moldy, cracking and peeling skylights. However before we get into that let’s make one thing clear. If you have a faulty skylight that is leaking into your house, you should replace it. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s address why I’m writing this article.
Skylights are exposed to more moisture
Cracked and peeling skylight fixed in New Westminster
Skylights are almost never installed at the same height as your ceilings. Skylights are usually installed on your roof and there’s usually a hole, 3 to 5 feet in your ceiling that leads to the skylight. This difference in height provides a perfect opportunity for moisture to rise up and get stuck in your skylight with nowhere to go. The moisture then gets absorbed by the popcorn texture, paint and drywall and starts the process of creating mold and mildew. Moldy skylights start cracking and peeling off. They create an eyesore as well as a health hazard.
Skylights are exposed to massive temperature changes
The hole leading up to your skylight gets extremely hot on a summer day. Far hotter than anywhere else in your home. This again is due to the heat not having anywhere to go, so it keeps accumulating in that one spot. This causes the popcorn texture, paint and the drywall to expand beyond their designed limits.
By the same token the space below your skylight gets cooler than anywhere else in your home during the night and in the winter. This causes the popcorn texture, paint and drywall around the skylight hole to shrink beyond their designed limits.
The heating and cooling cycles are repeated 365 days a year and slowly start breaking down the drywall as well as start peeling off the texture and paint that are sprayed inside the skylight.
Popcorn & other ceiling textures were never meant for inside a skylight
Cracked and peeling skylight fixed in Vancouver
Custom homes that were built over the past 40 years in the Metro Vancouver area, usually do not have texture sprayed inside their skylights. If your skylights are sprayed with popcorn texture or any other ceiling texture, it indicates that the builder was trying to cut corners.
Manufacturers of ceiling texture materials specifically instruct not to spray their product on the inside of skylights. The reason against spraying any type of texture inside a skylight is simple. Ceiling texture, including popcorn texture, provides much more surface area for mold and mildew to grow on. Therefore it’s a terrible idea to spray ceiling texture on the inside of a skylight.
So to conclude, a skylight that is displaying signs of mold and mildew, or starting to crack and peel, is at best an eyesore that needs to be dealt with and at worst a serious hazard to you and your family’s health. It’s necessary to consult a professional and remedy the situation.
Do your skylights need attention? Click here to take action!
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Cracked and peeling skylight fixed in New Westminster
Asthma & popcorn ceilings: Your ceilings are harbouring the invisible enemy that aggravates Asthma
source: fitsugar.com
Like many textured surfaces such as carpets and rugs, your popcorn textured ceilings can hold on to a variety of allergens, dust mites, insect bile, and spider webs. This is over and above the risk of your textured ceiling’s risk of containing deadly asbestos. Even if you make a regular habit of trying to keep your popcorn ceilings clean (few of us do), you can still count on dust, dirt, and other airborne pollutants to be embedded in between the rough surfaces that make up the popcorn ceiling.
To make things worse, many popcorn ceilings weren’t installed properly which means you may notice areas of your popcorn ceilings that are cracking and peeling off. The peeling of ceiling texture is a visible symptom of loose particles that are slowly but constantly falling from the textured ceiling and being inhaled by you, your kids and the rest of your family. Another visible symptom of popcorn ceiling particles coming loose and floating in the air of your home, is that no matter how often you dust your furniture and appliances, after a day or two, you will still get a thin film of dust on the surfaces you cleaned.
The thin film of dust that you see on your furniture, counter tops, TV set, appliances and other surfaces in your house, is made up of dust, allergens, dust mites and other respiratory system irritants that for the most part fall off from the textured ceilings in your home. This is why asthma & popcorn ceilings are never a good mix.
Over the last 40 years, the prevalence of asthma has increased from 0.53% of the population, to 4.8% of the population[1]. That’s an astounding 10 fold increase in a short period of 40 years. It is not a coincidence that textured ceilings were introduced in the mid 1960’s.
In the meantime, we are only masking the symptoms of asthma by using inhalers and other steroid based chemicals, while ignoring the real causes of asthma. According to the Asthma Society of Canada, 10% of the population in this country are needlessly suffering from Asthma [2].
Associated costs with the Asthma epidemic
In the Province of British Columbia alone, the annual cost of dealing with Asthma was $56 million (2006 figures [3]). If we extrapolate that number, Canada-wide, the cost of dealing with Asthma would have been over half a Billion dollars. As Canadian taxpayers, we have to understand that ultimately we are paying those costs out of our pockets.
According to the US National Institute of Health, the total cost burden of Asthma in the year 2007 in the United States was $56 Billion. You read that correct, that’s $56 million times 1000.
As the burden of Asthma increases, there are certain steps that we can take as citizens, including choosing responsible modes of transportation, reducing the use of airborne chemicals in our households, and yes, removing popcorn textured ceilings from our homes. If you are a homeowner whose family suffers from Asthma and other allergies, do yourself and your family a favour in the new year and get in touch with us here at RemoveCeilingTexture.com. You would be surprised how minimal the cost is to have smooth ceilings in your home and get rid of that unsightly and disease-ridden popcorn textured ceiling.
Is your family suffering from asthma or allergies? Click here to take action!
