8 foot ceilings - need to see pictures!
annettacm
15 years ago
Okay, I did a search, I promise, and unless it was deeply hidden in another discussion, I didn't find this topic:
I am moving into a house that has 8 ft ceilings. I just remodeled my kitchen (okay, four years ago, but it still seems new!) in my current house w/ 9 ft ceilings. Oh, the possibilities: soffits, 42" cabinets, cabinets to the ceiling, crown molding.... We did 42" w/ crown, staggered cabinets, and crown molding around the ceiling.
I want to remodel the kitchen in my new house eventually. In looking at the pictures I took one of the few times I've visited the house (we don't get in till end of May), I am now concerned about how to make this really pretty. Here is a picture of the current kitchen:
Am I going to miss all the fun of crown molding or all the pretty finishing touches now? Can I see anyone's pictures of their 8 ft ceiling finished kitchens??
Thanks!
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Buehl
15 years agoOur kitchen isn't done yet, but we do have 8' ceilings w/staggered height cabinets (36" & 30"), crown molding, etc.
Here's a closeup pic of one set of cabinets:
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Need fun ceiling light for little girl's room - 8 foot ceilings
Comments (1)Pottery Barn Kids/Teen lighting invariably has some cute kids lighting. BUT, there's been complaints about their quality. I didn't buy any PB Teen ceiling light, just a PB bedroom wall mount and desk lamp (incandescent and works fine, plugs in and easy to install). My daughter had a PB Teen bedside table with drawer plug for computer, but the plug was two prong, not grounded three prong and it sparked, so needless to say, I nixed it. I had already installed a dual detector smoke alarm (ionizing and photoelectric) but thankfully I caught that the bedside table drawer electrics sparked-think kleenex, paper, gum wrappers etc :(. Really though, PB Teen needs to step up on their quality in lighting products so do your due diligence. Here is a link that might be useful: Ionizing and Photoelectric smoke detectors This post was edited by SparklingWater on Mon, Mar 25, 13 at 20:58...See More8 foot ceiling with 36 inch vs. 39 cabinets
Comments (9)I think you'll get opinions all over the place. It really depends on your kitchen-- the size, the layout, the style, the light. We have a quite small kitchen and did the 39" cabinets with minimal molding. Since space is at a premium for us, we needed to get every inch of storage possible, so 36" cabinets with extra crown molding would certainly not accomplish that. We have cherry cabinets and a dark floor. We absolutely do not find our 39" cabinets cave-like or too towering. If anything, the taller cabinets make the room look bigger, the ceiling higher, than our previous 30" cabinets. I am not clear if Stacieann63's not liking her cabinets would be any different with 36" cabinets and a bigger crown - her dislike could be more to do with the cherry color, or that she is comparing it to her previous 10' ceiling kitchen. For us, aesthetically, a thick built-up 6" crown would weigh everything down in our small kitchen, and also would not go with our simple Shaker cabinet style and mid-century clean-lined home. We did choose Alaska White granite countertops which are quite light to balance the dark cherry. Regarding the comment about the space between the counter and the upper cabinets - the standard distance is 18"; undercabinet lighting typically takes up 2" of that 18". Though the newer LED strips are so small that the 2" allowance for lighting should probably be more like 1" for LED light strips (if you are thinking about undercabinet lighting at this point!). You could also have some of the cabinets with glass fronts if you are worried about taller cabinets looking heavy. A friend of mine did that with just three cabinets in her cherry kitchen, and it really makes everything look lighter. We considered doing that too, but DH didn't want that, and ours still looks great with all cherry doors. I would never choose shorter cabinets with bigger crown molding, but that's my taste, our home's storage needs, and our home's decor. Your decision should be based on those factors too....See More10 foot ceilings-- 8 foot cabinets
Comments (10)My kitchen has 10' ceiling and 8' cabinets (the shorter cabinets are actually ~7.5', and the taller cabinets have tall crowns that make them taller than 8') My KD recommended that we not go with taller cabinets (I had mentioned taking them all the way to the ceiling) because it would have overwhelmed my particular space. We used a very large crown (1') throughout the ground floor of our house, so I carried it through into the kitchen. I'm happy with the look and don't regret not getting taller cabs :) I think the crown on the wall really helped balance the shorter cabs. Here's a picture of my last house. I don't remember the dimensions offhand, but the ceilings were definitely 10' and the cabinets ~8'. I did that kitchen on my own when we didn't have the budget for nice cabinets or a KD, and it shows. It's like the rough draft of my current kitchen, LOL....See More8 Foot Ceilings
Comments (27)IMO you have to have the right style house for beadboard ceilings to succeed - you can't just chuck them up anywhere with any ol' kind of decor and architecture. Ditto for coffered ceilings, IMO. 3-dimensional ceiling treatments are tricky. (I've finally got DH really sold on tin ceilings for this house - steered him past a display of it at the home center and subtly made him think it was his idea LOL - but it'll have to wait until we find out if the downstairs ceilings have to come down to fix the "trampoline floors" upstairs. Bleh.) As long as it's never been painted, removing popcorn ceiling material is easy, if messy, so doing that part yourselves could save you some real money. Demo work always costs more than it seems like it ought to and it can be awfully therapeutic. ;-) Remove all the furniture from the room, cover the floors with waterproof disposable tarps (run them up the wall several inches and use wide painter's tape to secure them so water won't run under the baseboard, and tape the tarps together too) and turn the electricity off to the room and remove or cover light fixtures. If you have nice wallpaper or easily-damaged paint on the walls, tape plastic over the walls too. Even though it looks idiotic put on a shower cap, trust me on that, and oversized safety glasses. Get yourself a garden sprayer - the kind with the hose and canister - fill it with warm water, and wet the popcorn stuff down. Let it sit for a few minutes. Chances are some of it will start splatting on the floor all by itself but scrape gently at it with a wide scraper. You can even get scrapers that will screw onto a threaded wooden pole (like old-fashioned broomsticks), they're in the paint department at Lowes/HD, so you don't have to teeter on a stepstool or ladder. You may need to wet stubborn areas down more but you don't want to saturate the drywall. You may not be able to get every trace off but once the ceiling dries you can go over it quickly with a sanding screen on a pole sander and knock off any stubborn bits. Roll/fold up the tarp with the popcorn glop still on it for disposal; if there's a lot of water and you have a shop-vac available, by all means use that to suck up as much of the water as you can. All the supplies together would cost less than $100, maybe $150 if you needed a LOT of plastic (that's not counting a shop-vac, but that's not mandatory, and you might be able to mooch one off your contractor friend), once you get the hang of it it goes fast, and your contractor will have a nice clean surface all ready for skimcoating. If you're up to painting you could just have the contractor do the actual drywall-finishing work, saving you even more money. IMO if you put up beadboard or something on the ceiling I do think it would be best to remove the popcorn anyway in order to have a smooth surface to work with, but you can do a bit more mickey-mouse job of it. ;-) I think 8 foot ceilings are wonderful... my previous house had 7 foot ceilings (and slanted ones upstairs that went down to 3 feet high). In this house I'm blessed by ceilings a little over 8 1/2 feet (depending on where you measure LOL) downstairs and upstairs again those angled ones that go from 8 feet to 4 feet....See Moreannettacm
15 years agoannettacm
15 years agochmpgntst
15 years agoBuehl
15 years agomabnola
15 years agoannettacm
15 years agobrutuses
15 years agobluekitobsessed
15 years agoI'm happy to have 8 ft ceilings because it's better than the 6" dropped ceiling (total 7'6") holding an ugly fluorescent light box circa 1988 and even uglier drain pipes. I have 39" cabs and will have 3" molding. I'd rather have 3" more cabinet and 3" less molding, because the cabinets are arguably more useful (although not so much for us short people) than molding. Here is a pic of the 8' ceiling, before crown molding and before granite; the drain pipe from h*ll is in the top right corner.
And here is a photo of the same area after I put the granite in -- probably OT but I just can't get over my granite!!! :)
Buehl
15 years agoreno_fan
15 years agoBoth of my kitchens have had 8 foot ceilings. (Oh....one of these days I'll have a house with a grander feel and taller ceilings!)
Kitchen we redid in our last house:
Current house:
lagrant
15 years agoannettacm
15 years ago
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