ListWise

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Necessity is the Mother of Design

As I mentioned the other day, I went back and got some more of the salvaged beadboard to put on the ceiling of the laundry room, but there is a bit of a problem: The stuff is too short. I knew this when I bought it, of course. The room is 9.5X5.5 and most of these pieces are in the 3 to 5 foot range, with most being over 4-feet. You need to keep in mind, though, that this is salvage, so those 5-foot pieces may only yield 4-feet of usable wood.

So I started to think about ways I could make it work. Below is a crude picture of one idea.



I only drew in one of the 4 sections, because, as I’ve said time and time again, I basically a very lazy person. Just use your imagination to picture all 4 sections looking like the one with the lines. Anyway, the idea is to put short pieces in diagonally and then cover the seams with trim. The big circle in the middle will be a somewhat plain wooden medallion of some sort. I’ll make something myself, but nothing too fancy. I mean, this is a laundry room, after all. The light fixture will hang in the center of the medallion.



The four little rectangles at the center of each wall are the brackets above. I ordered them from Vandykes.com yesterday. They are 1.75X4X8 inches. $7.00 each. Then there will be thin strips of wood (think door-stop) with some type of routered edge that connects the brackets to the medallion. These strips will cover the seams were the beadboard ends meet. Finally, running in-between the brackets and the corners of the room will be a 1X3 crown molding that will cover the seam where the walls and ceiling meet.

To do it diagonal I need at least 4 pieces of wood that are 4.75 feet long, and then others that are progressively shorter. I think the second pieces on either side need to be about 4 feet long. So, I will need 8 of those. If I can’t get enough long ones I will do an almost identical design, only the pieces will be perpendicular the wall instead of diagonal.

Tomorrow I will start to go through the new load of beadboard I picked up over the weekend. I should know in a day or two if I can do the diagonal method.

4 comments:

Eureka Observer said...

Very clever. I think this will look really cool if you pull it off

Jan Marie said...

Wonderful idea, that pattern would definately draw your eye to the light fixture. Vintage light fixture????

Josh said...

Ditto the clever comment. The best solutions are ones where someone would never guess there had been a problem in the first place.

Gary said...

You could chevron it or "herring bone" it which would draw the eye even more and justify the trim. Speaking of herring bones .... I thought necessity was the mother of strange bedfellows?