I’m looking for some out of the box design options for an 8 ft high living room ceiling. The purpose of this exercise is to incorporate some indirect lighting and visual interest. The room is in a two story capecod (built in the 50s) with a bedroom above it.
I’d love to remove the center sections of a few joists, to create coffered ceiling look. I assume I can’t do that structurally. Can remove half the thickness of your joist if you beef it up with steel on each side? I assume that’d take an engineer to figure out.
I’d like to avoid crown molding with rope light around the perimeter. By itself it just doesn’t fit my vision.
other ideas ???
Replies
Don't remove any joists; houses of that era are not typically over-engineered. What you could do is remove some of the sheetrock on the ceiling.
Leave a 30" or 36" wide strip of sheetrock (or plaster, or whatever you have) around the perimeter of the room, and expose the joists in the center of the room. Install blocking where joists disappear behind sheetrock. Paint the whole ceiling white, or even better something other than white. A few shades lighter or darker than your wall color can look very dramatic. Install nice, modern track lights between some of the joists.
I have built rooms with boxed down soffits at their perimeters, the boxdowns bringing ceiling height to as low as 7/0.
With an 8/0 ceiling, that gives you a 12" high face on which to trim along the lower edge with a feature that can hide a linear light strip. Cove lighting like this can make a room look quite nice, especially so when the lighting is good stuff like Juno Trac 12 linear xenon, and dimmable.
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"A stripe is just as real as a dadgummed flower."
Gene Davis 1920-1985