Monday, April 29, 2013

What?! What!? Whaaaaaat?!? (a.k.a My take on the faux ceiling tray)

Awhile ago I posted the transformation of my dining room which can be seen here.  Likely, this is a project that you've never seen anyone do before....and probably won't in the future since the husband swears he will never help me do this again. 

And although it caused some frustration...(well to be honest it was a giant pain in the neck...literally...I mean, have you tried to glue stuff over your head before?  It gets old fast...) I couldn't be happier with how it turned out!




I've always loved tray ceilings.  There's just something about the depth of them that I find pleasing in decor.  So, once I had demo'd the dining room and had pretty much a blank (PINK) canvas, the idea hit me and I was wondering if and how I could make one using cardboard.  Of course, as I realized that this was completely possible, I also realized that I could easily (relatively) do just about any shape I wanted.  So here's how we did it:

After painting the ceiling the color I wanted inside the circle, we put up the template (just a single layer of cardboard cut to the rough dimensions).  We dry fit this, trimming where needed and making sure the circle matched up and looked, well, circular.

Please excuse the glare off my chandelier there....

Anywho, once we got it up there and we were thinking "ok, this looks pretty cool", I got to securing the pieces together to make 4 big thick panels. I used a mixture of caulk and tacky glue to get them all together (no real reasoning there, that's just what I had on hand)


That's actually two panels stacked together after being glued.  They are each about 2" thick.

Next, I got two big strong guys and had them hold a giant cardboard panel over their head and while I stood back and made them let me take a picture...


After which, we screwed it into the studs then added like a million more screws to help reduce the chance it would sag over time.


I put paper under it for a nice easy time painting it once it was up and not getting paint into the circle (I'm somewhat obsessive about clean lines....)


Our first experiment with finishing it we used spackle over the screw heads and caulk for the joints inbetween the panels so they were flexible in case of some shifting over time.

We then tried painting over this, but as I suspected, it dimpled oddly and looked TERRIBLE.
I think the husband and I both looked at it with the paint up and were like "OMG, we're going to have to take this thing down after all this $%&*.....we need to make this work!"

The solution?  A cardboard cap.  We simply made another layer and glued it to the one that was firmly attached to the ceiling already.  After a bit of caulking around the rim of the circle and the joints of the layers, we painted and finally had a smooth, beautiful finish.


The medallion for the ceiling, which in its former life, served as a bistro table. 

And Ta DAH!





I LOVE IT!

Happy Crafting!



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