I'm guessing those are 10' ceilings - seems to me there is a bit more space than you think because many things in those pictures are large scale. Looking at the scale of the front door in particular it looks to be larger than a 6'8" (those window panes are large) so if it's an 8' door..... anyway, I think the ceilings are taller than you think.

But that has nothing to do with putting beadboard on a ceiling! I have beadboard on the ceiling of my 3 season porch - it's original to the house which is old, and my ceilings are only a bit over 8' - slightly shorter on the porch. The thing about the coffering in those pictures is that it hides seams - there are no long runs of the beadboard so you're only seeing it perfectly placed. Beautiful rooms - lots of inspiration.

Babs, you can have a similar ceilings without such large (deep) coffers. We'll be doing a similar treatment in our Gentlemen's parlor. We too have eight foot ceilings.
~Becky

Look what I found when searching for pictures of built in libraries!

Here is a link that might be useful:

I think they are 8' too. My ceilings are 8' with exposed logs running under the 8' part, so it does make the actual ceiling height a little lower than eight feet. While someone who is very tall might feel a little claustrophobic in our house, for myself and my husband, it just feels cozy, so I think it's a great idea to cover the popcorn with bead board and even a little bit of coffers!

~~Veronica

I think they are 8' also....and that's what bugs me. they are too heavy looking to be that low down. they make the space seem to closed in. If they were up higher, they would look fantastic though.

Those pictures are just gorgeous and inspire me to try to make my staircase and house look like that.

To me it looks very spacious and expansive, and I'm guessing it's because everything is the same color. Not sure how high the ceilings are. We have 9' (boring uncoffered) ceilings in most of our house and I'm surprised how low they seem, but it is because the rooms are much bigger than what I'm used to. The bigger the room the lower the ceiling looks (I think).

If it is an 8' ceiling, maybe the coffering on the ceilings pictured gives the illusion of higher ceilings because even though the beams are lower down, you have the "going up" into the coffers effect. Hence an uplift.

The ceilings are OK, though not my taste. I have no clue how high they are.

But I can tell you with surety the seats on the chairs are appallingly bad. Stripes should run from back to front and should line up with those on the boxing. (they get an "F" on "rate my chair seats").

Oh, wow, chelone, I went back to look at what you were talking about. That is some of the worst upholstery I've ever seen. Looks like someone didn't order enough fabric to run the stripes the right direction or to match stripes at the seams.

I agree that those heavily coffered ceilings look to heavy, and it looks like 8' ceilings. What about using beadboard to give the ceilings some interest without creating the claustrophic feeling of those heavy coffers?

I've got horrible 8 foot popccrn ceilings, too (it's also on the walls but that's another story). We are actually seriously considering the beadboard option. I love the look, I just need to convince Hubby. I actually asked about it over on the kitchens forum as I'd seen some people that hang out there with beadboard ceilings.

I've almost got Hubby convinced so wish me luck. ;)

I also adore those ceilings and think you should go for it! I believe they are 8' -- looking at the desk in the kitchen, it's most likely 30" high, and not much more than 3 of them would fit stacked there.

Lis

pbrisjar, what kind of feedback did you get on the kitchen forum? What kind of questions did you ask?

Thanks for your input guys! This is really helpful!

Steph

I'm not sure if the ceilings are 8' or higher, but I found a great site the other day that shows before and after pictures of a very impressive low-cost kitchen remodel, which included a remarkable make-over of the owner's popcorn ceiling. The red kitchen cabinets are very charming also!

Below is an excerpt describing the materials used for the ceiling, and if you scroll down on the linked page, you can see the before and after photos.

"The ceiling is made up of individual 5 inch wide tongue and groove pine planks bought at Lumber Liquidators. I think it was about $1.60 a square foot - maybe even less than that. The beams are box beams (hollow inside)"

Here is a link that might be useful: Kitchen remodel

juddgirl2, THANK you for that site! What an inspiration!

anele - I thought so too! I think I found the site when I was searching for ideas about painting my oak kitchen cabinets. Hers were quite a transformation. If I had a cottage style house, I would definitely copy those red cabinets!

babs711-

When was your popcorn ceiling put in? Or, the real question, do you know if its asbestos or not? Last spring, I had my condo's popcorn ceilings scraped off, skim-coated and sanded and the whole place repainted with BM paints for $6200 for 1350 sq. feet. The contractor didn't break out scraping vs. painting, but I wish I'd had the scraping done long before I'd put the place on the market. The difference was amazing!

Wow juddgirl, thanks so much for that link! That's wonderful!! I saved that link!

rabbit house, the people before us renovated the house and had small kids so they had everything checked out. The house was built in 1977. It's slightly over 2500 square feet, so if we're talking $12000 for all the ceilings (except our bathroom which already has a smooth ceiling), we'd have to just do a bit at a time, starting with the main rooms first.

I think I'm going to call my contractor friend a talk with him about my options.

You guys are awesome! Such great ideas!!

IMO you have to have the right style house for beadboard ceilings to succeed - you can't just chuck them up anywhere with any ol' kind of decor and architecture. Ditto for coffered ceilings, IMO. 3-dimensional ceiling treatments are tricky. (I've finally got DH really sold on tin ceilings for this house - steered him past a display of it at the home center and subtly made him think it was his idea LOL - but it'll have to wait until we find out if the downstairs ceilings have to come down to fix the "trampoline floors" upstairs. Bleh.)

As long as it's never been painted, removing popcorn ceiling material is easy, if messy, so doing that part yourselves could save you some real money. Demo work always costs more than it seems like it ought to and it can be awfully therapeutic. ;-) Remove all the furniture from the room, cover the floors with waterproof disposable tarps (run them up the wall several inches and use wide painter's tape to secure them so water won't run under the baseboard, and tape the tarps together too) and turn the electricity off to the room and remove or cover light fixtures. If you have nice wallpaper or easily-damaged paint on the walls, tape plastic over the walls too. Even though it looks idiotic put on a shower cap, trust me on that, and oversized safety glasses. Get yourself a garden sprayer - the kind with the hose and canister - fill it with warm water, and wet the popcorn stuff down. Let it sit for a few minutes. Chances are some of it will start splatting on the floor all by itself but scrape gently at it with a wide scraper. You can even get scrapers that will screw onto a threaded wooden pole (like old-fashioned broomsticks), they're in the paint department at Lowes/HD, so you don't have to teeter on a stepstool or ladder. You may need to wet stubborn areas down more but you don't want to saturate the drywall. You may not be able to get every trace off but once the ceiling dries you can go over it quickly with a sanding screen on a pole sander and knock off any stubborn bits. Roll/fold up the tarp with the popcorn glop still on it for disposal; if there's a lot of water and you have a shop-vac available, by all means use that to suck up as much of the water as you can. All the supplies together would cost less than $100, maybe $150 if you needed a LOT of plastic (that's not counting a shop-vac, but that's not mandatory, and you might be able to mooch one off your contractor friend), once you get the hang of it it goes fast, and your contractor will have a nice clean surface all ready for skimcoating. If you're up to painting you could just have the contractor do the actual drywall-finishing work, saving you even more money. IMO if you put up beadboard or something on the ceiling I do think it would be best to remove the popcorn anyway in order to have a smooth surface to work with, but you can do a bit more mickey-mouse job of it. ;-)

I think 8 foot ceilings are wonderful... my previous house had 7 foot ceilings (and slanted ones upstairs that went down to 3 feet high). In this house I'm blessed by ceilings a little over 8 1/2 feet (depending on where you measure LOL) downstairs and upstairs again those angled ones that go from 8 feet to 4 feet.

A contractor should be able to give you a quote per square foot, so you can at least come up with a rough budget price.

As for figuring out the height of the celings in these photos, after much investigation, I would say that those are 10' ceilings. The way I determined that was to compare the distance from the top edge of the door on the left side of the last picture, it looks as though it goes to a closet or powder room underneath the stairs. We have 9' ceilings in our house, meaning that there is 2 feet of wall above our doors. The space to the bottom edge of the wood for the coffered sections looks to be slightly more than the space above our doors, and then you have probably a foot of framework before you reach the bead board paneling.

The wainscoting appears to between 4-5' height. Standard heights for bead board wainscoting is 36" or 45", so that's probably the height done in this house. Another way to tell is by the number of stair treads, with a count of 17 treads, (2 hidden behind the chair, and 1 hidden at the top for the second floor).

That's one gorgeous house - I'd love to see all of it, and it gives you a lot of inspiration.

Heidi

I just realized how to figure the height. Assuming each step is 7.5" tall (mine are and they are standard), it looks like the tread that hits at ceiling height is the 15th one. So, 15 treads x 7.5" = 112.5". Divide that by 12 and you get 9.375 feet tall. So unless those steps are seriously shallow (6.4" tall), it looks like the room ceiling is 9' high. Sorry!

Well that makes sense. As I was looking at that last picture, it just looked like the room remaining over the counter was almost the same amount of room we have remaining over our kitchen counter. And if you think that their coffering is taking off some of that 9' ceiling height, then the coffering is probably coming down to almost 8' or a little above. Thanks!

I don't know what construction costs are in your area, but I had my whole house scraped, re-textured in light orange peel and painted for $4500 and my house was 2380 sq ft. It took them a week (while I took a vacation) and I even had all the closets done. Couldn't stand the popcorn stuff. The ceilings felt so much taller after that. This was about 4 years ago, I'd definetly have it priced out. I even had a 2 year warranty on the work.

Another thing you could do is use 1x4" trim and lay out a grid on the ceiling, then use 1/4" plywood cut into whatever grid size you want in between these and you'd have sort of a craftsman styled paneled ceiling.

babs, yes exactly, so if you have an 8' ceiling and do that same treatment, it will come down to just a little more than 7' high, which could be very low to have such heavy coffering... could be oppressive. Something more simple could be very beautiful.

Yep bigdoglover. We already have a beam going through our living room. It drives me nuts but I live with it. I figure that if we do beadboard (without the coffering), it would look really nice and not heavy but would make the beam fit in better. I'm inspired!!

The ceilings are pretty but I'm with Chelone as I couldn't stop from looking at the horrible seat covers.

I came across this site and saved it for future ideas.
Maybe it will give you some ideas.
Just a note, it takes a long time to load.

Here is a link that might be useful: inspiration