How to Plywood Plank Over Popcorn Ceiling

Hello there!

I’m so excited to share how to plywood plank over popcorn ceiling with you! At some point someone added popcorn texture over the plaster ceiling in our living room. We assume to hide some of the major plaster imperfections, but the truth is in only drew more attention to the issue.

The Plank Solution 

We went back and forth on how we wanted to fix it because drywalling a ceiling is basically the bane of my diy existence lol! So even though planking it would be a bit more expensive I thought it would be worth it because it would be an easier process and add a ton of interest and character! And I was right!

Because Every Project Has a Story

Except for that one unforeseen hiccup where Ed fell through the ceiling right before we started! Thankfully, aside from some scratches and a gnarly bruise he wasn’t hurt badly. But what a mess! We had just moved all our furniture to this side of the room so we could start on the other. And he was doing some re-wiring for the light in the attic when he fell.

The mishap and mess only set us back an hour or so though. After checking Ed over I definitely had to go outside for a minute and pull myself together. But the truth is that crying would have only wasted more time. So we got to cleaning and about halfway through we started laughing about ol Clark Griswold hanging from the rafters lol! It was seriously just like a movie!

Project Materials

For this project we used

• 6 sheets of 11/32 Plywood from Lowe’s – our room is roughly 15×15
• 1 Gallon of Premixed White Valspar Paint in High Hide White
• Paint Roller
• Saw to cut the plywood
• Nail Gun
• 2 inch Nails
• Ladder and Scaffolding

Project Prep!

Before we started the ceiling Ed cut all the plywood into 8″ planks. He made a sled (shown below) to speed up the process. We got 6 planks out of each sheet of plywood. Then I gave one side of each plank 2 coats of paint. This meant that once the planks were nailed up we were done!

Goodbye Popcorn Ceiling

Once we started getting the planks up it was a fairly quick and easy process. We decided to stagger them like wood flooring, which meant that Ed did have to cut some of them down in length as we went along, but I think it was worth the extra time and effort.

We started out trying to evenly space the boards but ended up just eyeballing it because our walls aren’t perfectly square. Old house probs! Ed had an idea where the rafters were so he did aim for them when he could but because our ceiling is plaster and lath the wooden lath slats also help secure the planks.

How Long Did it Take?

Without having the tumble through the ceiling incident this was a project that could have easily been done in a day, but it took us a couple hours on day 2 to wrap it up.

How to Plank Over Popcorn Ceiling

I honestly couldn’t be happier with the result! The planks took the ceiling from being an eyesore to being a beautiful feature in the room! Plus at right around $140 I think we got a ton of bang for our buck too! I wish we had done it a long time ago so we would have had longer to enjoy its charm!

I hope you enjoyed this article on how to plank over popcorn ceiling and that you’re inspired to tackle your next home project too! We will be adding lighting and molding soon! Can’t wait to share the end results with ya!