Today I want to talk about how to upgrade your ceiling for cheaper than you might think. Most of the time when people think of upgrading or renovating anything in their house they neglect their ceiling. I think most of this is because your conventional ways to upgrade your ceiling are not cheap.
There are a couple of options that I have found to upgrade a ceiling. One is a ceiling tile like this but they are not my favorite, it is too Victorian for my taste. Plus it costs $2/sq ft which is a little pricey and that doesn’t include paint.
So I started looking for something a little more rustic like tongue and groove wood ceiling planks like these, although they are $1.40/sq ft. This also doesn’t include paint or primer.
So I thought I would make wood ceiling planks myself so I started looking for some wood to make it work and I found these. I used 4’x8′ sheets of plywood that cost $0.40/sq ft instead of over a $1 which is fantastic and way more affordable. Now the task to upgrade your ceiling doesn’t seem so bad right? At least cost wise. So now I have a bunch of 4’x8′ sheets of plywood and I needed to take and cut them into 4-inch by 8-foot boards. (These ended up being just shy of 4″ because of the blade width that would get sawed off the cuts) This took a while to do but it worked out. I went to a friends house who has this table saw. To rip the boards down to 4″ thicknesses.
It took an hour or so to be able to rip the boards down but it was worth it to save a bunch of money and to still upgrade your ceiling. Here is what my truck looked like after ripping all the boards down.
As you can see it wasn’t a small feet by any means to get these all cut, the next step was getting them to the house and whitewashing them.
This took a while to get it all done but after I got them all whitewashed then I was able to get started nailing them up on the ceiling! Which was really nice to start getting stuff up and making the house look better!
I cut the boards in a 8′ then 6′ then 4′ pattern so that they were staggered so that it looked better. All I used to do this was a Miter Saw like this one and a nail gun like this one. After a few days I now have a ceiling that isn’t covered in wallpaper (ya that is what was on my ceiling) and now it looks like this!
So the next time you are thinking that something else needs to be done on your house remember that there is an option to upgrade your ceiling that looks great and is cheaper than you may have thought!
What do you think about the look? Would you do something like this in your house? Let me know in the comments below!
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