Wood ceilings and heavy timber beams painted white … sounds pretty nice doesn’t it? It brings to mind bucolic summer vacations and Vera Bradley catalogs. I am sitting here on my couch … and I might need to wrap my head with an ace bandage because I think it is about to explode. Why you ask? (you are asking … right?) It’s because four years ago when we bought our current house, I mentioned to my better and smarter, more beautiful half that I thought we should paint the ceilings white because the house is really dark –
… and she said no
… until the other day when she said okay
… and now I am nervous about actually painting them out.
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I have dark rough hewn cedar beams and tongue & groove board ceilings through out my entire house. We also don’t have loads of windows so the overall natural light quality, while nice, is quite dim. Very dim. This is the Master Bedroom, (this picture is from the infamous “Ye Olde Sconces” and post I wrote about my ridiculous light fixtures that do not add to the overall light quality of the space.
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Knowing that we had a problem, we decided to paint the walls an even white-ier shade of white … that was bound to help. It did but the process completely sucked … I wrote the post “Painting isn’t fun anymore” describing the process. Painting has never been fun but it didn’t really seem like work before either. Painting that stucco was a lot more work than we thought it was going to be and cutting in around all the beams and wood was how we spent 70% of our time. We kept mumbling to ourselves that this would be a lot easier if we simply masked off the floor and sprayed the entire room.
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The kitchen – a black hole of light absorbing happiness … in this space, food tastes bland and that’s only if you can find it while groping around trying to feel for the refrigerator. I might be slightly exaggerating but you can see that this is a pretty dark space considering the fairly sizable window at one end.
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This might actually be my most favorite space – the office. It’s also the location of my embarrassing first water color attempt (“I’m learning a new skill“). I added the Louis Poulsen PF5 light fixture because it’s a classic and I think it looks good in the space but honestly, the light quality Sucks. (That’s right, sucks with a capital “S”). You can’t even tell it’s turned on unless you’ve loaded it up with a 200 watt light bulb (really) and that weighs on my semi- environmentally conscious soul.
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Just looking at this picture makes my back hurt (and I’m sure my backside is making your eyes hurt…).
So what now … paint the ceilings? It most definitely freshen the place up and make it a bit more modern.
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So, what happens when you paint a wood ceiling white?…… glorious angelic illuminating white? I did a Google search on white painted wood ceilings and found about a million examples (it was actually 12,900,000) that served my purposes. I only needed a few to illustrate my point however.
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Yes, the view is rather nice and there is no shortage of natural light but just look at that beautiful ceiling. Still has texture and plenty of visual interest without a dark ceiling to visually weigh the space down.
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One of the things that my house has that is similar to the image above is rigorous geometry. The wood beams line up with everything – the architect who designed my house was painstakingly methodical about it and you can tell when you are in the actual space. Yes … the ceiling needs to be painted out to take advantage of the layout, turning what I consider a liability into an asset.
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Of course, I don’t have the large windows or the the lot sited on Montauk Lake. I also don’t have all the super amazing furniture but it is easy enough to recognize that painting my dark ceilings white would change the look and feel of my house significantly. I know what some people are going to say … “your wood ceilings look great, don’t paint them!!” Yeah, they look okay in these pictures but up close … from where I am currently sitting and looking at them, I’d tell you that they are look filthy and despite the 50+hours of trying to clean them, you just can’t clean rough hewn cedar beams. I tried a feather duster once and I left half of the feathers behind stuck on the roughness of the beams.
Now I got that to clean up as well.
Anybody else gone through this process before? and have some words of wisdom for me? I mean, I’ve painted thousands of ceilings between my own house and my projects – this is going to happen. Has anyone else had wood ceilings that they painted out white to brighten the space and visually lift the room? I’d love to see it.
Cheers
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