Ceiling Progress

We spent our long weekend (courtesy of Martin Luther King Day) putting up trim boards. After we finally finished putting up all of the drywall, we then painted the entire ceiling a bright white (Valspar Ultra White in a Satin finish) to contrast with a light grey walls.
*Most of the time if I am doing light walls, I will continue the same color up onto the ceiling, but with this decorative ceiling we decided to paint it all the bright white our other trim and baseboards will be.
After giving our necks a few days' break, we got all of our trim boards up. We decided to glue and finish nail them, just to make extra sure they would stay put.

This is what it looked like when we got it all up:

Looking pretty good, right? Well, from far away, it doesn't look too bad, but close up, this is what it looks like before we fill in all the nail holes and caulk all the seams and edges (oh, and give it all one more coat of paint):

Yes, still lots of work left before we can pronounce this project done -- but we're making progress! We're planning to have the living room/dining room part of the ceiling completely done this weekend. (It never hurts to hope...)

Ceiling Prep

I'd like to tell myself that doing this ceiling treatment is easier than mudding, sanding and matching the existing texture on the ceiling, but unfortunately, it is not. BUT, it will look 100% better than the old dated texture. Before we could get started on the actual install, a lot of prep work took place.

The first thing we did was plan out our ceiling grid. We are doing this treatment in the entire main floor, so making the grid pattern look good throughout actually took a lot of work. We wanted to make sure none of our trim boards would be going through any existing lights, so some adjustments were necessary.

First we took measurements of the entire ceiling and the placement of all the recessed lighting and existing light fixtures. Then Luke created a layout in Google Sketchup (a free sketch-up program online). After many hours of tweaking and planning, it looked like this:

(Top-down view)

Next thing we did was mark all of the joists. The boards have to be screwed and nailed into something solid, not just drywall, so this step was crucial. We found the joist locations and then marked them all the wall across the ceiling with a chalk line.

Like so:

We confirmed the location the joists by screwing into the ceiling to see if we actually hit something. This left the ceiling a bit "hamburgered". But, we're covering it up anyway, so no worries.

Then we hit our first huge obstacle. We picked up sheets of 4' x 8' "brown board" or "masonite" to cover the whole ceiling and create the smooth surface. We got our first board up and we were making some final adjustments and the board came crashing down. !?!?!?! The board literally split apart from itself leaving some of the board on the ceiling and most falling on our heads. Obviously, the wrong material for this job.

Back to brainstorming.

After a lot of discussion and research we decided 1/4" drywall would be the best material for the new ceiling. Not only will it hold well on the ceiling, but all the screws can be patched and sanded down for a perfectly smooth surface. Also, it is easy to cut, and any mistakes that we make can be repaired quite easily. We should have chosen this first...but, live and learn...

Once we actually got the correct material, installing the boards wasn't too bad. Time consuming, but we feel confident that it will hold up and look great. The only truly tricky part was getting the boards up over the stairs. You don't want to know how we did that...no really, you don't.

The best help we had was a drywall jack we borrowed from my brother-in-law. If you are going to attempt this project, find yourself a jack. It will save you, literally.

Getting a board up -- assisted by our little helpers... Seth loved the fact that he could help crank it up.

The living and dining room boards are all up. We gave ourselves a couple of days to recover from the neck and shoulder aches. Next up will be to fill in and sand all the screw holes that won't be covered by the trim boards and then get the ceiling painted.

We are doing this project in phases because our stair railing will be done any day now and the ceiling needs to be up before we install the floors, but the floors need to be installed before the railing can be put in. So, we are in a bit of a time crunch on one end the house. Once the stair railing is installed, then we'll continue the ceiling throughout the rest of the space and then finish up the floor installation as well. It is all about priorities at this point.

Christmas Hiatus

Between busy holiday plans and the whole family getting sick right before Christmas, our house renovation slowed down quite a bit.

In my last post at the end of November, my sister and Luke's brother had helped us get the whole main floor painted. (Thank you!) But, we ran into a major issue. Removing the walls around the staircase and the areas around our new pantry left seams on the ceiling that had to be patched.

(Sorry for the blurry picture, but you get the idea)

We spent hours -- no, days -- patching, mudding, and sanding those seams. Luke meticulously matched the ceiling texture and before we painted, it was looking pretty good. After the paint though...not so much. The seams were undeniably noticeable. It was a huge setback and we started brainstorming.
Option 1: Leave it and hope no one noticed. (Not really an option in my opinion...)
Option 2: We could try it again, which meant days and days of sanding, mudding, texturing etc, with no guarantee that the seams would actually disappear.
Option 3: Hire out a professional
Option 4: Cover it up with a new ceiling treatment

Option 3 was looking to be pretty expensive because we had so many areas that needed work and for the same amount of money we could install a new ceiling and get rid of the dated textured ceiling that we both hated anyway. Not to mention that when we took out the wall between the kitchen and dining room, we found out that the ceiling texture was different in the two rooms.

So, after lots of discussion, we decided to do option 4. I've always loved the look of coffered ceilings:

Source

But, our ceilings are a standard 8 feet, so giving up that much ceiling room wasn't an option. But I have seen something called a flat coffered ceiling that could work really well. Something like this:

Source

So, December was spent planning and prepping for this ceiling treatment. I can't wait until it is is done -- it is going to look so much better that the old textured one! I'm actually pretty glad that patching the ceiling didn't turn out -- chalk this one up to a 'happy accident'.