DIY Ceilings For Small Spaces

It feels a bit taboo to talk about DIY projects when my business is built off clients hiring me to take the reins and execute their projects from beginning to end. BUT- truth is, I am a DIYer at heart. It’s really how I got started in this wild world

of interior design. I find myself encouraging friends who ask me for advice to go for their DIY vision. It taps into your creativity, it challenges you to learn a new skillset, and it’s very rewarding when you finish your project because- you did it. So I thought I’d share a project that I’m doing in my spare time in my husband and I’s condo. 

Slowly, little by little, hour by hour (feels like at times) we are fixing up our condo we live in. Our ultimate goal is to sell it as a turn key listing when we are ready to buy a house. With that said, all the investments we make into this place have to make sense. Meaning, I am probably not going to shop around like I do for the majority of my clients because the return in value isn't there. We are budget friendly here, we are focusing on using material that will give us the same strong design impact but DIYer friendly.

So I am going to share what we are doing to our ceiling because this makes such a big impact to any space that will help us stand out and make this condo feel special. Now, obviously this is all a work in progress so excuse my mess as everything is disarray at the moment. It actually drives me nuts and I know how all my clients feel when we come in and tear everything up to make it all beautiful. It’s always worse before it’s stunning.

Our condo was pretty plain Jane and it really was killing me since I get to do so many fun projects for clients. I had this wild idea of making our condo more like a raw, colorful cottage vibe home. It’s really pretty eclectic but I wanted the bones to feel this cottage so

ul. So I convinced my husband, Jeff, to turn our plain ceiling into wood slat ceilings with beams. We 3 goals to focus on:

1. Budget friendly: We didn’t want to blow money on tongue n’ groove boards or shiplap for the wood slats. 

2. We have average 8ft height ceilings. We didn’t want the ceiling to feel shorter so we had to make sure the beams were the right height to make the ceiling actually feel taller.

3. We wanted it to feel light n’ airy with color mixed in.

So how did we achieve all this? 

1. For our wood slats, we purchased multiple sheets of birch underlayment plywood, we decided the width we wanted the slat to be without wasting too much material, and my husband cut the sheets into strips with the table saw… he’s an artist and pretty darn handy! This is an inexpensive option.  And we figured out the grid we wanted to lay the slat so the seams were hidden when we installed the beams.  Now, we picked this material because it was appropriate for the space. This is not the case for everyone, a million dollar home should be using the appropriate material to achieve this. 

2. 

   For the beams, we bought 2x4 studs and cleaned them up with a light stand. We choose this because we did not want to have thick or deep beams. We wanted it to feel organic, like we found it this way,  like it was always a part of the structure of our home. Again, this is not the option to go with if you have tall ceilings or a well established home.

3. As much as I love wood on wood, I knew it wasn’t going to work in our home. We decided to paint the ceiling Sherwin Williams Snowbound. This immediately gave the personality we were going for. The ceilings actually feels taller, it’s light n’ airy, it feels raw and beautiful at the same time, and feels special for a boring ol’ condo that was so uninspiring to me. 

Our Living Room Ceilings

Our living room ceilings- My husband is building book cases to create more charm and storage for the chotchkes.

We will actually be shooting my home in the coming weeks. So I’m off now to shop around for pieces to place in our newly updated DIY home. Stay tuned for the final look!