A lot of my rooms have 8' ceilings and I have a nice chandy in the DR. Looks nice, but it's over the DR table so no one can hit their head on it. lol.

We also have hickory engineered wood floors. Very durable.

You will probably get used to the ceilings in no time. The good news is that there is a better chance that stock drapery will work without being hemmed :)

Recessed lights and floor/table lamps are ways to compensate for the short height and no chandeliers. My main tip is that as you repaint the rooms, do not look at the ceilings and say, "meh, they are pretty okay." Repaint them as well, since they are closer to you the difference is amazing when you go from sort of dingy white to fresh and clean white.

Congrats on the new house!

EC, if a chandelier is over a DR table, it's fine. Mine's pretty big and it makes the room glow.

I have to disagree about recessed lighting. We have one can light above a counter, and if I had more of them, they'd really stick out because of the height of the ceilings. Which really aren't that low.

We have eight foot ceilings in most of the rooms in our house. The only rooms with higher ceilings are the family room and the master bedroom. (Both are newer additions.) The walkout basement, that we use daily, has celings that are lower than eight feet! (And DH is 6'2"!)

We have a chandelier over the DR table, ceiling fans, recessed lighting, and crown molding. It all works!

The floors in our house are original, and they're white oak with a pecan stain. They've held up well for nearly 60 years! When we did the addition, we had the floors matched (site finished, solid hardwood) and have been happy with them.

"We have a chandelier over the DR table, ceiling fans, recessed lighting, and crown molding. It all works! "

Us too, also with 8' ceilings (none of which are white).

Our previous house had 8' ceilings, and I worked with them by using or establishing vertical rectangles everywhere I could.

Most of the seating had low backs. All the curtains hung from ceiling to floor.

We put two-piece crown molding in every room, and painted the ceilings in very very pale whispers of color - pink in the neutral colored rooms, matched to the walls in the ivory ones, and palest blue in the working rooms.

Every big mirror was hung vertically. Smaller pictures were hung in groups with two rows.

The chair rail in the dining room was painted to match the wall, which kept it from slicing the walls in half. Every table or chest was treated as part of a unit, with things hung over them that created a vertical composition.

Here are a few photos, which most of you have seen before. (Over and over, I'm afraid.)

The living room, where the verticality was helped by the painted paneling and the long windows, too:

The library, where we took off the mantelpiece and surrounded the firebox with wide molding painted to look like stone, and designed the shelving in sections that reinforced the vertical:

The other end of the library:

The kitchen, where we replaced the upper cabinets with open shelves, and kept it all as monochromatic as possible:

brownysmom, thanks for posting your pics...especially the kitchen. i'm wanting to remove our upper cabinets until we remodel and will use your photo as inspiration.

concerning the 8 ft ceiling height...i much prefer to the enormous vaulted ceilings. our last home had high ceilings and i hated them...love the 8 ft ceilings in our current home. agree that crown molding is a huge plus. finding lighting fixtures can be a bit of a pain (unless using over a table) so recessed lighting is a great choice. recessed lighting also helps to keep the ceiling surface from looking cluttered. i have several in my kitchen and i couldn't imagine any other option. will replace all the other fixtures in the house with recessed ones when we renovate as well.

flooring...when i think of farmhouse (one of my preferred styles) I think of wide plank pine. granted you may not want the distressing that comes with pine.

B's pictures are the perfect example that you can do anything in a room with 8' ceilings.

We've generally had homes with 8' ceilings - our current home does except for the living room and entry hall which has a vaulted ceiling. There are plenty of non-recessed lighting fixtures that are made to work for that ceiling height. For example, you can go to Lampsplus.com and look under Ceiling lights where they have a category "Close to ceiling" that has hundreds of lights in many styles. As long as the light is around 12" high, it's going to be fine over an open floor area.

oakleyok - we also have a chandelier in the dining room, and you are right, with a table under it there is no problem. I thought the OP was talking about not being able to put chandeliers in areas that people walk thru. Like the trend to put a small chendelier in a bathroom or a big antler-laden chandelier in a family room. That's tough to do with 8' ceilings.

We have recessed cans in the kitchen and I love them there. I think the smaller cans (4" diameter) would be great in our living room but I'm not about to run the wires & stuff it would take to do that. I think large diameter cans (10" or more) would be tough to pull off with a low ceiling.

A voice in the wilderness here, against recessed lighting, especially in a farmhouse.

It is great for functionality, but I don't like the look (ever since someone called ceilings with recessed lighting "pockmarked"). I actually think the cans are more noticeable with low ceilings.

We are looking at a new project, and for that home I want no recessed lights.

Because chandy's don't work everywhere, i plan to have a lot of floor outlets that are switch driven.

Just a thought.I figured i'd share it because it is against conventional wisdom...

Yes, I agree that pot lights can be problematic, and should never be used for general lighting in living areas. And if you do use them, the smaller the better, provided they give enough light.

If you look at the photos I posted, you'll see that in the LR and library I used table and wall lamps, and had all of them at about the same height, which pulls your focus away from the ceiling. We did use one pot light to give light over the coffee table in the LR, and two at each end of the room very close to the walls to light the pictures at one end and the built-in cabinets at the other (which isn't in the pics), but they were there for a specific purpose, as part of the overall scheme..

I also used them in the kitchen, placing one over each of the four doors in, and two groups of four as general lighting, one group in the area you see in the photo, and one group at the other end, where we had the breakfast/beverage bar and the kitchen table.

Each of the groups, and each of the four door lights, was on a separate dimmable switch. Nearly drove the electrician to distraction, because I wanted to be able to control both groups from both ends of the room as well, but it was well worth the effort to gain that flexibility.

floor outlets are a great choice. i personally don't love overhead lighting in living rooms and bedrooms so anything that makes using lamps easier (wall switches) is wonderful. i'm not a big fan of any of the ceiling fixtures i researched. so many of them looked like boobs and i don't love that look. currently have two boob lights in the hallway and can't wait to replace with recessed...or maybe wall sconces. all of the fixtures i loved won't work with 8ft ceilings.

interesting to see the different opinions.

apologize for poor typing..broke my right wrist and am not a lefty.