with the pictures its hard to tell, from what I can see it looks like really heavy orange peel. my advice would be to look up a dry wall contractor or actually a couple and get a few prices on retexturing, dry wall mud seems simple but trying to do a vaulted ceiling like that is a pain in the butt. try a cats paw texture.

Is it popcorn? Taking it down is a mess that can last a long time if you try and do it yourself. We started doing ours and it was "incomplete" for months. I finally called and got estimates for the job and a whole house 3100s.f. was ~$5000. They took off all but 500s.f. of the ceiling (that's how far my hubby got, before he gave up) and did a double knockdown. They covered everything in the house, and completed the job in 3-4 days.

Even if you take the popcorn off yourself, you won't be saving much money. They ended up charging us just as much for the finishing as they would have to do it all (removal and finishing). No one wants to come out for "half a job".

IMHO, putting a new texture on is really a job for professionals. We had a friend do one room of our house, because he was cheap and had quite a bit of experience doing it. That was a mistake! He had some dinky apparatus for DIYer's, and it was a pretty bad job.

The tool to do a really professional looking job is rather expensive, and only the more established businesses can afford it. Don't cut corners on this one. If you don't like it now, you'll really hate it if you go through all the effort and expense to change it, and it just ends up a "different" version of bad.

oh by the way if it is popcorn like arley had, which like I said its hard to tell from the photograph. test it for asbestos. and in that case its better to hang all new rock and mud that up. and yes I agree with arley, I wont even touch those I have one of my drywall subcontractors do it because I cant do that good of a job on it. I'm great with wood work but dry wall mud is not for me.

Oh, but the way, we had a grambel roof, Dutch Colonial, think barn style, with beams in the main room (Hubby removed about 75% of that ceiling, 18' at the highest point). The rest of the house was 8' ceilings. Your neck and shoulders will take months to fully recover from the removal of that stuff.

I agree with Arley again. same reason I don't do dry wall.

The ceiling isn't popcorn but a very heavy orange peel as Kenyon noted. Sounds like a professional drywall job is in order! Thanks all...

To update it have a professional drywall contract 'skim coat' the ceiling. This will be very costly and VERY dusty. Consider decorating the walls so that the eye's attention is drawn to them not the ceiling.