Congrats on the new place and good luck.

I don’t have any suggestions for a popcorn ceiling, but I’m stuck with a pink bathroom if it makes you feel any better.

If you have asbestos, the project becomes very expensive to pay professionals to remove. You might want to simply consider makking a new ceiling by suspending a new layer of sheetrock below the existing cottage cheese ceiling (Thus encapsulating the cottage cheese between a sandwich of sheetrock and giving you a new, smooth surface as a new ceiling). This would be fairly inexpensive and aside from finishing the seams is easy to do (with help to lift the drywall panels up to the ceiling). Also, it only would drop your ceiling down another half-inch or so and would have the benefit of insulating your home from the unit above.

I have a friend in the construction business who says that removing the aspestos laden cottage cheese can be done safely yourself with the proper preparation (plastic sheeting, goggles, industrial strength dust masks, and soaking the cottage cheese with a lot of water).

However, this solution needs a lot of care and you end up with bundles of plastic sheeting with what amounts to toxic waste inside. It may be illegal to do the removal yourself and disposing of the bundles is probably illegal too.

I think *I* would probably close it up with the sheetrock. Although if the price for professional removal is in your budget, you earn good karma points for removing a hazard for future generations.