The Floor and Ceiling Are Finished – One Room Challenge – Week 6

This week for the One Room Challenge™ we are closer to the finish line because the floor has been painted and the ceiling trim pieces have been installed.

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You might be thinking that I had already shown pictures last week of the painted ceiling.  And you would be right – I did.

The ceiling in this dated screen porch room was originally painted a dark brown color to match the trim color of the house.  The wood of this ceiling being just simple plywood panels.

But we didn’t want this dark ceiling for the new sunroom so we painted over it in the same light gray color of the exterior walls of the house because it would blend with the two existing exterior walls of the room and make the room so much brighter too.

So we painted it. 

And then we saw it!   

Something that you can’t easily see in the above picture. But we could.

Every uneven seam where the boards came together on this ceiling just stood out.  The light gray color couldn’t camouflage the seams as well as the original dark brown.

What is more, it appears that back in 1979, whoever installed the boards just used what may have been leftover from the structure build because the boards don’t have a consistent layout or size across the ceiling.  There are edges and seams of the boards in all directions and lengths!

Honestly, this was not something that was that noticeable when the ceiling was so dark. 

Not being able to ignore the unsightly seams, it was my husband’s idea to add another design task to this project.

He just couldn’t stand the rough uneven edges of the boards being a focal point of the ceiling.  So he decided that we would install 2 x 1 trim boards to the ceiling like a coffered ceiling to hide the seams as best as we could.

Of course we couldn’t cover ALL of the ceiling board edges because then we would have a different mess of visible lines and boards all over the ceiling. More visual chaos was not the answer.

In the end, we installed two long lengths of trim boards to cover the most prominent plywood board seams down the length of the room.  Then two lengths of shorter trim boards in the opposite direction to mimic a coffered ceiling.  The large empty area in the center of the ceiling would frame the new ceiling fan.

No we did not hide all of the seams for the ceiling plywood boards.

Instead we created a different focal point to the ceiling to distract from the uneven look of the whole ceiling.  It is far from perfect but still much better overall.

To be honest, the only people who would notice it the most is probably us and our kids who lived here and saw the ceiling in the brown phase for so many years.

After tackling the ceiling problem, I moved on to the concrete floors.

As you can see in the image above and the one below, the old concrete floor was stained and needed some TLC.

If I didn’t have a budget and four dogs in my house, this room would have beautiful tile floors underneath our feet.

The realty is – the dog door to the pen is in this room and mud and dirt will follow them in each time they go out.  And the budget has been stretched too thin already.

To save money, we decided to paint over the stained and ugly original concrete floors to a nice gray color that will wear well with dog traffic and provide a clean modern look to the room.

The process to clean and paint concrete does take several days of work and waiting, and I will share our experience in another post this summer.

For the color of the floor, we chose a simple gray, ironically called Fresh Cement, from the Behr® line of porch and patio paint.  One day if we decide to install tile, the floor is ready for that next phase. If not, then we have achieved a much better looking modern painted concrete floor.

This medium shade of gray on this floor will also work well when we paint the exterior of our house next Spring in a different shade of gray or blue.

If you notice in these pictures that the ceiling appears to be half done, because it was.  While my husband was on call at the hospital this week I took advantage of the beautiful sunny weather and painted the floors before he was finished with the ceiling. 

For now, I am glad we decided to paint the concrete floors instead of installing tile right away.  I like the crisp clean look of it.

This project has come a long way from Demo Day and Rebuilding the Walls.  And then on to the weeks were we just couldn’t get out of the Messy Middle.  Currently, I am still searching for mid century items for this room as I mentioned last week in the post about Struggling To Find Mid-Century Decor Items. 

However, finishing the floor and ceiling of our new sunroom leads us to the most exciting part of the project.

Pulling it all together for the finish line!  

In the next week we will begin installing the furniture, rug, and drapery for the room.

I hope you will come back to see it.

Hugs,

Proverbs 13:3 “Whoever guards his mouth preserves his life; he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin.”