I scraped the popcorn ceilings off most of the main floor of my mom's house. And it actually wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. My brother came over and did all the ladder work where the ceilings are 14' high, and the ceilings were in pretty good shape so patching, mudding and taping was easy.
We left one of the bedrooms stippled as it was previously painted. And after having the ceiling in the entire house painted, I'm not sure why I went through the effort of removing the stippling: it looks fine with a fresh coat. (I do know why: there was water damage from last winter)
