Basement Family Room Part III

Hello All!

Just popping in to share some more basement family room progress with you.

 

 A couple of months ago when I saw The House of Smith's wood planked wall  tutorial, I fell in love for three reasons.

a.) they were gorgeous

b.) the process looked easy

c.) it was a CHEAP project

I immediately pinned their tutorial and couldn't wait to share it with my husband.  I thought it might be a perfect solution to cover up our 30+ year old basement ceiling, which was not in the best shape. It would add a dash of character to the space too ...which was an added bonus.

You may remember what this room started out as three and a half years ago...

Last week, my husband got to work covering up the ceiling in this room.  After the old popcorn ceiling was scraped off and the dingy brown beams were taken down, you could see all the sheet rock seams and it wasn't a pretty sight.  Since it's a basement, it was also a bit dark in here too.  We added eight new recessed lights before we added the wood planks.  Adding more light in here has made a whole world of difference.  It's so much brighter, warmer, and happier!

The wood planked ceiling was applied using the same guidelines that The Smith's gave in their wood planked tutorial for their wall ...with only a few minor changes to adapt it for our ceiling.

Their wood planks were six inches wide, ours are five inches...

We used finishing nails and liquid nails (it's a ceiling after all and we don't want any of those bad boys hitting us in the head if they were for some reason to come loose).

...And we did a staggered layout of the boards instead of just one plank on top of the other.  (Mostly because our ceiling is wider than the eight foot long boards.)

This whole project only took one day and the result is amazing.  Buh-bye ugly ceiling.

Here's a before shot of one of the family room walls on our move in day.

And here it is today with the most recent addition of the wood planked ceiling.

Now our predicament is do we paint the planks or not???

Our original plan was to install the planks and then paint them white.  But for the moment, we're kind of enjoying the natural color and texture of the wood grain against the gray walls.  The paint has already been bought, but maybe we'll just procrastinate the painting for a little while.
I don't know.  What do you guys think?