Is It Worth Removing an Artex Ceiling?

What you are really deciding

Nobody loves a swirled ceiling, but the question is not taste, it is whether the disruption is worth it to you now or at the point you redecorate anyway.

If you are painting the room, carpeting it or having it rewired, that is the moment: the mess is already happening and the ceiling is the one thing that is far harder to do later with furniture back in.

The asbestos question, answered plainly

Artex from the sixties through to the mid eighties can contain a small amount of asbestos. A textured ceiling sitting there intact is not doing anybody harm. Making dust out of it is the problem, which is exactly what scraping and sanding do.

So the sensible method is to leave it where it is and cover it. We either overboard, fixing new plasterboard through the old ceiling into the joists, or prepare and treat the texture so a skim bonds to it. Neither disturbs the material.

If you want certainty before anything starts, a sample test through a testing laboratory is the only thing that gives it. Our method does not change either way.

What you lose, and what you gain

Overboarding costs you the thickness of a board and a skim in ceiling height. In a room with low ceilings that is worth talking about first; in most rooms nobody notices.

What you gain is a flat ceiling that takes paint evenly, no shadows across the pattern in low light, and a room that stops looking like it was last touched in 1983.

The cracks nobody mentions

A ceiling of that age has usually been cracking quietly under the texture. Flatten it without taping those first and they come back through the new finish within a season. That step is where a cheap quote and a proper one differ.