Almost every time I post a picture of our kitchen on my Instagram, at least one person asks about my wood ceiling. It’s taken a little while, but I finally got to put together a tutorial for how we made it! Bear with me – I didn’t intend to write a tutorial, so these are mostly iPhone pictures as we took progress pictures of the kitchen (and there’s a LOT of them!)
How to build a wood ceiling:
We took out a few layers of ceiling in this part of the kitchen – and after going through 2 or 3 layers, we got to the final layer. It was uneven and just bad…and I decided I wanted to make the best of it and put a whole new layer of ceiling under it.
We started by attaching 2×4’s around the perimeter of the ceiling, and then adding a cross through the middle of the room connecting these beams:
It took us a while to get the framework just right. Once you do, the rest of it is relatively simple!
As you can see, we had a really uneven ceiling to work with. Just make sure you’re leveling your 2X4’s as you go – this will be your framework, and it’s so important to keep it level!
We got our lumber from Lowe’s. These are the boards we got – the important thing is to make sure they are tongue and groove boards. The thickness is a matter of personal preference.
We pre-stained them with my most favorite stain
We nailed the boards to the 2X4 supports we had as our framework. We didn’t screw them in, and didn’t feel we needed to. Especially on the middle support – the nails are there to prevent future bowing, but aren’t truly needed for the structure.
We had a few can lights to work around – we cut around them with our jigsaw.
It was SO EXCITING to cover up all of the junk that was up there:
We went board by board – make sure the tongue and groove is tight together, and then secure it with nails. It worked well for us to have one person nail whlie the other person kept the board tight against the previous board.
We had to stop halfway through to take care of some plumbing issues upstairs while the ceiling was still open – this is what it looked like for about a week:
Finally, the planks were all in! It looked so good, but we wanted to finish off the edges. I would recommend doing this, because it will give you a little bit of wiggle room for your edges as you’re going along.
We put up planking on our walls, painted them white once they were all the way up to the ceiling, and then added crown molding.
The crown molding is the piece that truly finishes it all off. Since we’re in an old house that basically never has 90 degree angles, we used these corners (also found at Lowe’s) and it saved us lots of headaches.
We then painted & caulked everything:
And it was finished!
This was the perfect solution for us and this space – I’m honestly not sure how it would work in a larger space. I think you would have to make a few other support beams going across and it would work, but obviously more square footage = more costs for lumber.
I LOVE our ceiling, and I’m so glad we decided to do this instead of the boring drywall route. It adds so much character to this space, and really ties the room together.
See all of the details of our kitchen makeover here, and see our whole house full of makeovers here!
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