The living room ceiling, stripped in an earlier renovation (photo by Katherine Slingluff)
My house is evolving?the drywall is being installed, the porch is almost done and the exterior trim should be completed soon.
My kitchen ceiling is gorgeous. It was initially sinking and bowing from water damage and I guess lack of support beams. We took it out…and discovered mold inside on the wood and thick paint with caked up grease. YUCK!
I wasn't planning to miss those wood beams at all after taking them down. I was initially evisioning the "possibility" of its beauty on my ceiling after I sanded it down, but have no regrets about removing it. (I'm keeping it for use on something else?either cleaning it for my studio, someone else's house, or create scultpure with it :) )
After the tongue and groove ceiling was removed, the ceiling beams were reinforced and balanced, and ripe and ready for some fresh new tongue-and-groove wood. As I am so involved in my house and watching what's going into it as they build it, I happened to see them (the workers?with direction and approval from my contractor!!!) bringing the boards in to install that YUCKY, greasy, lead-painted ceiling back in my house…yes! the nasty one that was taken down and still uncleaned and without any mold remediation. I was in shock!
I put a stop to that right away! My contractor and I NEVER discussedreturning this moldy, greasy, lead-paint old ceiling to my kitchen, and Iwould have never approved of returning mold back to my house. The ceilingwould have to be mold remediated, cleaned and sanded first (my housewas mold remediated?I'll get to that later).
I noted to him and the workers that the ceiling is nasty and moldy, and asked themhow they planned to remove it. They said they would take the paint offafter they installed it. What!?! There's mold on one side and caked upgrease and paint on the other! I couldn't understand how that planwas going to work.
I'm just so glad I was there to catch this (anotherreason for good communciation with your contractor and being involvedwith what's going on as they work on your house). Its very important toknow what's going into your house, not just how pretty it'll look inthe outcome.
So Mike, the builder/carpenter foreman, suggested to me that I use thethin beadboard ceiling that they installed under my porch, since Ididn't want the YUCKY mold ceiling going back up. I thought that itwouldn't look right at first (I was set on either replacing my 4"- wide,grooved tongue-and-groove ceiling as it is, or not using wood at alland just drywalling it).
You see, the tongue and groove was a part ofthe original house, and was the same tongue and groove ceiling that wasin my parlor/dining room. I was thinking of consistency with the oldhouse features and maintaining some of this look as I restore my house.Well, in order to do this, we would have to find the old pine and getit milled?which would take a bit of time and $$$…and we needed theceiling up ASAP to continue moving on.
My plan B was to just drywall it. Well, Mike suggested to me again the next morning to go ahead andlet him install the thinner beadboard ceiling. He said he had someleft over from the porch and had installed a ceiling like this inanother house. He assured me that it would look great. I took his wordon it…gave the go ahead…and Mike was right! The ceiling isbeautiful!
I may put a cream glaze wash on it. It would be the color of thewalls (a cream color) and would take out the light, raw pine look onthe ceiling. I don't want to paint on it (I actually love wood and liketo see its grain).
Thanks also to Nancy Robbins, the interior designerand Lyndon Landix, the electrician for helping out with the design andinstallation of the recessed kitchen lights. They layout of the lightsand the tongue-and-groove ceiling are such a complement to one another!
*rashida
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