Dining Room Project: Removing the Ceiling

A couple of months ago, I wrote about tearing down the chimney in the kitchen. Let me tell you what happened next -- the next day, actually. We rented a trash container and pulled down the dining room ceiling.

Please note, for future reference, the plain ceiling, the plain cove-moulding (it might even be quarter-round, I can't remember), and the dark blue walls.

First, having just finished the dusty chimney demolition, we taped off the archway to the living room and covered the stained glass windows and the mullioned bookcase doors on the east end of the room. The ceiling removal was nowhere near as messy; it took us about 3 hours from start to finish.

The people who hung the false ceiling in the 1950's did it simply. They nailed 13' lengths of 2x4s across the ceiling, and then applied drywall to it. All we had to do was crack the drywall and pull it down, and then pry off the 2x4s without destroying the beams. The Man, being taller, did the standing-on-the-ladder pulling, and I threw the bits out the window into the container in the driveway alongside. Almost as efficient as the people who put the thing up. Not as messy as chimney demolition, the dust we kicked up is visible in this photo.

Here you see the room from the opposite angle from the preceding photos, showing the protected windows to the east. He is holding an average size piece of drywall, ready to be thrown out the open window. The cross-hatch work above him shows the dark wood box beams with the unfinished 2x4s at more frequent intervals across it.



The boards came down with little fuss, leaving relatively unharmed, lovely original old-growth fir box beams, and an original plaster over lathe ceiling. The box beams form a central open rectangle in the room. My camera can't quite pick up the beauty of the wood -- I will try to photograph them again with controlled light.



Details: If you blow-up the close-up on the right (click on it), you can see:

1) The long hole down the middle of the room in the lathe-and-plaster where the people in the 50's ripped through to install the one additional support for their crossbeams;

2) Some damage here and there to the beams, during the installation of the dropped ceiling (on the beam below the hole, for instance). Generally, however, there was little damage, and the beams didn't need more than a wipe to remove a thin coat of dust. They've spent 50 years sealed away from sunlight.

3) The imprint in the plaster of the original light fixture in the center of the room, half-obscured by our fixture. The original was round. We have a Rejuvenation House square-based fixture, a modern version of one from the same period.

4) One of the casualties to the beams that we discovered -- two missing boards from the box beams nearest the window. I wonder if they first tried to remove the beams and then decided to just install over them? Unplastered lathe is hidden under the beams.

5) If you look carefully, you can see curious striations on the walls, too: moving upwards, you see blue up to a point, a line of pink, irregular spots of brown plaster-paper, and then a wide line of gray, unpainted original plaster. From this we have worked out that the original crown molding in the room was quite deep -- about 5 inches. From books about the period, we can recreate that it was a somewhat textured cove molding with a picture rail underneath that. At some point between 1915 and 1950, the picture rail was removed and the plaster-paper painted pink (popular off and on from the 1920's through the 1950's). The crown moulding was removed only when they dropped the ceiling. We can't get anything exactly like the original (nothing that deep is available at Rejuvenation House) but we'll put in something more interesting than quarter-round.

6) If you look very carefully, you can see the hole in the wood at the intersection of the two beams shown behind the light fixture. Each intersection had the hole, and the faint imprint in the varnish of a round fixture. Peering into the narrow hole with a flashlight, you could see the original wiring (still hot, according to the electrical discharge monitor thingy) awaiting a bulb to illuminate. This is also typical of the style of the time.

Coming soon: Next steps in the Dining Room.