A BLUE CEILING
When my mother died it was left to my siblings and me to decide what to do with the family home. My parents had built the house back in the mid-sixties, a single level ranch with a developed lower level walk-out in a brand new development on Madison's Eastside. Back then it was still considered farmland rather than suburbia.
It was difficult to consider anyone else living in the home we had grown up in. We thought about selling it and dividing the profit. The home had been paid in full a long time ago. None of my siblings were in a position to take it over except Rick and me. We were trying to figure out where we wanted to be and the opportunity of being home owners once again drove us to the decision to be the buyers. For me it was a tough decision. I spent my adult life trying to move on carving out my own path. Coming back to buy the home I had grown up in made me feel as if I hadn't gone very far in my life. It would mean going full circle and coming back to where I had started. If we were going to take possession of my family home it was going to be imperative for me to make over the house so that it was our house and not the story of a son having to move back into his parent's house.
That's how we began an almost complete renovation of 714 Merryturn Road. We decided to leave the footprint pretty much in tack but beyond that most everything would have to go.
Carpeting would be ripped out and replaced with five inch wide white oak floors. Flat hollow-core doors would be replaced with three panel Prairie-style solid doors and all the moldings, door and window casings would change from 3 inch "off the shelf" stained pine to wider simpler painted ones.
The list of "to dos" was extensive and daunting and as with most renovation lists a growing number of fixes became the equivalent of a bad case of poison ivy. Itch it and it spreads.
One of the itches we hadn't originally thought we were going to have to scratch was the ceiling. Over the years as the house settled cracks in the ceiling had developed in the open areas stretching from the entry across the living room past the three-faced fireplace and to the beam separating the dining room from the kitchen. We thought it would be an easy fix; patch the crack, dab on a little paint and call it done. Nothing is easy and nothing on a "to do" list in a renovation comes cheap.
Along with our contractor we investigated and researched various solutions to ceiling repairs. Just doing a drywall patch didn't seem like the way to go. Spackle or paint was only a band-aid attempt at a problem that needed real surgery.
This needed repair that we had calculated as minor was turning into a new ceiling that would have to not just cover our crack but the entry, stairwell, living room and dining room ceilings. It was like a virus in our home that had to be treated before it spread any further.
We had been trying to convert our mid-century rambling ranch house into a cozy prairie cottage. After the thought of minor repairs got tossed out the window we toyed with the idea of adding beams to get that cottage feel. But with a relatively low ceiling we opted for a cladding of v-groove planks of pine that we were going to stain a driftwood gray-blue. The process was pretty simple once we had worked out the right combination of stains.
Here's what we did. We bought stain grade pine v-groove lumber. We decided the more knots and imperfections the more interesting and authentic the ceiling would appear.
Next we laid out some sawhorses in the front yard in a Beverly Hillbillies Clampett sort of way as the base for our painting stage. We used rubber gloves and had a tub of rags set at the ready.
For our stain we chose Cabot semi-transparent deck and siding stain. We chose two colors: Chesapeake blue and Fieldstone gray. It's a rare day when we can find a color that works for us all by itself. The combination of these two colors gave us the right shade of blue we were looking for.
We bought a couple of small rollers and brushes and a couple of tray liners and we were set.
We started with the blue, rolled it on one slat at a time,
went back over it with a brush to get any missed crevices but mostly to brush off any excess stain
and then went back over it with a rag wiping off a lot of the remaining stain. This took a little muscle power. We wanted the wood to be almost wiped dry. What we ended up with was a translucent stain with a lot of the original wood color showing through.
If we had left it here we would have had a very baby blue looking ceiling so we repeated the process with a coat of Fieldstone gray
This toned down the blue giving us a more sophisticated subtle blue color.
The key with the staining is to do the rolling, the brushing and the wiping without letting any time lapse between each part of the process. You don't want to let the stain set too deep. You want to preserve that translucent quality that lets some of those gold tones of the wood shine through.
Our contractor had just torn out a set of fifty-year-old rotting wrought iron porch rails and then ingeniously reconfigured it into a drying rack for us he set up in the garage.
The ceiling is now installed and every day as I sit in the living room or lounge in the snug I have the privilege of looking up at the wooden sky we installed. It's something you might not think would elicit any kind of an emotional response but it did. It makes me stop and appreciate. It makes me take a deep breath. It relaxes that knot in my neck. Who says interior design is frivolous? It improved my state of mind. and it helped to make me feel as if I had moved forward. We now have a home that says this is our house.
The concept worked and we won the job. Now with everything installed their daughter doesn't feel like a fifth wheel and the client loves the solution.
Design is constantly a task of solving problems with well thought out and stylish results.
