April 6, 2016

How To Build: Coffered Ceilings and Wall Paneling Part 1

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As a custom home builder, you see many different types of builds; currently we are building a custom home in Kerrisdale, Vancouver that has features which deserve their own two-part article.

 Mar 10

Kerrisdale Home

Walking into this custom build, your eyes first fall onto the intricate patterns that sprawl out on the ceilings and walls. As both designs are/were beautiful and time consuming to create, we are going to feature a two part series of articles explaining  how these items were constructed. First off we are starting with the ceilings of this Vancouver Custom Home.

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Coffered Ceilings from our Kerrisdale Home

The coffered ceilings have a unique design to them, straying from the regular “tic-tac-toe” model. The front rooms’ ceilings contain five panels: four would-be-squares with one large rectangle situated right in the middle cutting the other panels so they can never quite be the quadrilateral. The different design, changes the nature of a coffered ceiling from whimsical to sophisticated.

Front Room 3

 

Go further into the home, you can see an almost breathtaking design of diagonal criss-crosses display on the kitchen and living room ceiling. The choice to leave the norm, adds a visual texture to these two rooms that make the heart of the home come alive.

Living Area 6

 

Living area 5

 

Creating these designs takes skill and precision, which our team was more than happy to step up to the plate to provide. After the initial framing of the home, we did something called steel stud framing in the areas of interest. This is where we built out the shapes and lines to create the much loved coffered effect. Using steel instead of wood ensures that the design we create will not change over the years.

The unfortunate truth of wood is that it will shrink and, in cases with a design like this, warp! This is not something that will be good for the home or homeowner, so we use steel instead of wood. Steel will withstand time and neither shrink nor warp, leaving no foreseeable problems of a coffered ceiling’s beams warping.

Once the design is blocked out, we drywall! Taking all the steps we would normally take to drywall a home, in this area we cut much smaller pieces of drywall to create this ceiling. Making these type of ceiling incredibly time consuming. 

 

 

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BUT after some mudding, mouldings, a quick paint: you can really see all that initial work pay off!

 

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These ceilings aren’t the only breathtaking feature of this home, be sure to check out our blog next Monday where we explain this Custom Home’s beautiful wall paneling!

 

If you or someone you know are thinking of building a Custom Home in either Vancouver, North Vancouver, or Burnaby or you just like this article give it a share on Facebook and Twitter! Don't feel like sharing? Just check out our gallery, Facebook, Instagram, and/or Twitter below!!

 

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