Wherever you put the ceiling fan it has to be where the blades clear the slant.

There is nothing that says it has to be a single fixture in the ceiling. It could make sense to do a couple. If you are set on one, I would center it so it at least casts light evenly down and not down and off center.

"Wherever you put the ceiling fan it has to be where the blades clear the slant."

Are people really that...? Wait, don't answer that. Let me have my illusions.

"There is nothing that says it has to be a single fixture in the ceiling. It could make sense to do a couple."

The MBR is about 12x15 with the slanted bit on the narrow dimension (rendering the flat part of the ceiling approximately 12x10ish), the other bedroom aka library approximately 10x13 with the slant along one long side of the room (bookshelves along the two long walls, window, reading chair and side table take up the end wall; flat part of ceiling in there is about 7x13). We're not talking these modern master bedrooms you could play badminton in. :-) So I'm not sure how I could put multiple ceiling fixtures into rooms that size without it looking awfully cramped or using ceiling acnecan lights which is nonnegotiable - I don't care for them in new houses, but in a 108yo house it's horrid IMO. (PO put them in the kitchen and I grind my teeth every time I see them.) There is no access above the slanted part of the ceiling and my electrician has been unsuccessful in fishing down in there from the attic area.

For the library I was thinking about using a two-light pan fixture I have on hand that looks much like this one. It needs a serious cleaning and rewiring, but a complete rewiring would only cost about $35, with new sockets and the works, through a local hardware store. It came out of a house of similar vintage and nearly identical style that was being gutted so I know it's appropriate for the structure.

I haven't settled on an exact fan yet - of course the prettiest ones are all waaaaaay too big for the room. :-( I prefer ceiling fans to be decorative just like any other lighting fixture. Last summer we had a stand fan in the MBR and while it was functional and rather pretty, off-season storage is at a premium in this little house, so I'd definitely rather find a good-looking ceiling fan with lighting than a regular overhead light and a portable fan I have to find somewhere to store.

The overhead is definitely not going to be the primary light source in either room, but I do like to be able to just flip a switch and get general overall lighting for cleaning or to fetch something, and they'll be on dimmers. The switched outlets are a PITA, they are ALL in inconvenient locations, and IMO there are only so many lamps you can put in a room before it starts looking like a lamp showroom! I know other people have higher "lamp quantity tolerances" than I do but I max out at about three in a comparatively small room. Maybe four if they're really special lamps, not just ordinary ones.

Mari, I would probably center the lights in the flat ceiling area. I'm one of those people who would lay in bed at night at be very bothered by the fact that the light wasn't centered in the "real ceiling" space, even if it was centered in the overall outside dimension of the room. I'm just that way.

So, my suggestion would be to decide where the lights/fans would make you and/or DH the least twitchy and put them there. ;-)

Yes, people can sometimes be that...

It is hard to visualize 3-dimensional space, so accidents do happen in planning.

The pan fixtures are great. They drop the light source a bit. I agree that recessed fixtures are not the best in an antique house.

Thanks! DH is opinionated about some things regarding decor (such as color - he was raised by an artist and thus is obsessive about color being Just Right) but he couldn't give a hoot about the lighting part as long as he can see. Well, except that he hates the can lights as much as I do. :-) The more I chew on it the more I think I'm most likely to be like housewitch, I DO tend to think of the flat part as being the "real" ceiling. I lived in a LOT of 1 1/2 story houses when I was growing up, very very common here in New England, and the angled part was always treated like part of the wall WRT paint, wallpaper, etc. even though that's not the way people seem to consider it today which sort of threw me off.

I have a long bedroom with several nooks and crannies. I debated this same issue. While we don't have slanted ceilings, there wasn't a logical center to focus on due to the bay window and a seating nook. The bathroom juts out into the MB which cuts off part of the logical center as well as a closet that does the same.

So I decided to hang each fixture (we have three) in the logical use center. One is centered in the bay window, another is centered in a seating area on one side of the room and the final one is lined up with that fixture and centered on a doorway across the way from it (complicated to describe).

So if you're doing more than one fixture and there's a logical use area to focus your lighting on, I'd use that as your decision maker, verses worrying about the slant. Or is there is only one logical place for the bed, focus on that as your centering point. In my master there are two areas that could be used for the bed so I took that into consideration as well.

In that smaller room I'd focus on centering the fixture in the room since it sounds somewhat square. I personally have a little rule about when a slope should be considered ceiling or wall. If it's a steep pitch that flows down into the bottom third of the room I'd treat it as ceiling, but if it's a lesser pitch that stops in the top third of the room I'd treat it as ceiling and focus it into the centering equation.

Did that help at all? No :) I don't think you can go wrong...aside from that whole "fan blade not smacking the ceiling" portion of the topic LOL