The ceiling. Yup probably the most boring part of the room, right? Well boring, that is, unless you live in a house with super high ceilings adorned with fancy beams, rustic paneling, or ornate posts. Alas we can’t all live in a home with ceilings as perfect as these.
My husband and I have been lamenting over our lack of an awesome ceiling for several years. It’s not even it’s absence of awesomeness that bothers us so much as the readily apparent absence of competent craftsmanship that went into it’s flat drywalled simplicity. In the expanse that covers our open living room and kitchen area you can see every drywall seam. Now, the house is about 10 years old and you can not only see the seams, but there is some cracking along them as well. This problem makes the whole room look shoddy. The big question is, what to do to fix this dilemna? We’re serial DIYers, but drywall is one of those things that is sooooo hard to do correctly and quite frankly doing it on the ceiling is even harder than the wall (and a mess)! So I could pay someone to come in and just fix the drywall seam problem, but that’s about as exciting as buying a washer and dryer…. ya know…. you spend all this money on a necessary thing and after shelling out all that cash… yay…. you’ve got …. laundry. So if we’re going to spend some cash to fix it then I’d like it to look spectacular.
While we don’t have soaring vaulted or cathedral ceilings, we are fortunate enough to have 10 foot tall ceilings. So there are a number of options out there that we could try and we’ve each spent too many hours on Pinterest and Houzz trying to decide which idea is best for fixing our wonky ceiling. Here’s some of the ideas we’re considering (note: our house is a modern colonial so we’re looking for an idea that doesn’t stray too far from the style of the house.
First up, this coffered ceiling, would be something that we think we could DIY right over the drywall seams, the only challenge would be the existing recessed can lights would need to be moved because they wouldn’t be centered (so, ultimately, more drywall patching necessary).
Or maybe even this more simplistic version of square panels? You can see here in this photo below that they also had to even out all the ceiling mounted lights.
This picture is intriguing to me because my kitchen cabinets are the same grey as these, but I worry that the rustic beam and shiplap is a little too farmhousey for my colonial?
I think this option might be the way my husband would want to go, cover the ceiling in wood, but I fear that if you picked a wood that is similar to the wood floor (a medium gloss Brazilian Koa), it’ll look too much like a church, and if we pick a wood that is too different from the floor it’ll just clash.
A tin or faux tin in a simple pattern might work, provided it was painted white or a distressed white, otherwise I think it’d be a tad busy. This pattern below is too ornate for my taste.
We could achieve a similar look with an embossed wallpaper applied to the ceiling. Undoubtedly a real neck breaker, so I can’t say I’m looking forward to applying any of these finishes myself.
I’d love to hear other unique ideas for hiding ceiling seam problems. What do you think?