Failed First Attempt At Ceiling Texture

In my house I unfortunately have popcorn ceilings. Out of everything in the house that is what I notice the most. I was able to successfully scrape test areas without a problem using the Homax ceiling texture scraper. This was purchased at my local Home Depot in the painting section. It only took half an hour for about a 10 x 10 section of ceiling with only 20% of the texture not making it into the trash bag attached to the scraper.

So I'm wandering down that same isle I got the scraper in and I see some premixed ceiling paint and texture by Behr. And of course immediately I envision myself not having to buy a hopper and sprayer, spending the time to find the right consistency of mud and not having to practice for half a day to get the right texture I want. Grabbing a 2 gallon plastic container I head to the paint counter, have them shake it up and confirm with the paint person I should use the largest nap roller to apply the texture paint. Oh, I was all to happy to pay the $18

I took a few minutes on my lunch break yesterday to visit the Behr site to check out the recommended application. They mentioned applying the texture paint with a loop roller and then using a smaller nap roller to set the texture height. That night I laid plastic in a hallway closet that I had previously taken down the popcorn ceiling along with some other prep work like taping things up. After opening the container I was glad I had them shake the stuff. There is no way I could have gotten the sand as evenly distributed in the paint. When I started to roll the texture on I immediately noticed that it wasn't going on consistently. I'm not sure if it was the amount I loaded onto the roller or what. It took me about half an hour to apply the texture as evenly as possible to a 4' by 4' section of the closet ceiling. I had to do some major touch-up to some areas. When I went over a previously textured area it would yank clumps off the ceiling. There was no way I was doing more than that section of ceiling with this stuff.

Needless to say I'm buying a hopper and sprayer this weekend. I was thinking later that this stuff might be OK if I wanted to trowel it on. As far a creating either a knockdown or orange peel ceiling texture this wasn't going to work. Granted I didn't have the recommended loop roller, but at the rate the texture was making my thick nap roller one big solid piece of sand I don't think it would matter.