What is Bead board? Like popcorn ceiling or wood?

Wood-like wainscot for a ceiling.

I like whole house concepts, varying a little with artwork. Sara Richardson/Design Inc. is my favorite decorator. I liked an arabesque ceiling detail they did. Here's a link to a few ideas for ceiling detail.

I personally don't like bead board.....anywhere. I do like shiplap walls tho.

Our porch ceilings are beadboard. I like them for a porch, wouldn't really want one inside the house.

I don't have it but would like it in my livingroom someday. A friend has it in a bedroom and it looks really nice.

We have a faux beadboard ceiling in the living room at our lake cabin. The ceiling in that area peaks slightly. The rest of the house has flat ceilings, drywall.

During construction:

Finished

My friend has it on the living-dining-kitchen peaked ceilings, and the hall leading to the bedrooms. the bedrooms, though, have drywalled ceilings. It’s a simple MCM ranch. I like the look, it creates a clean cozy Scandinavian look to me.

maddielee....that's NOT just beadboard. Beadboard is 3" wide. That's a panelled ceiling with beadboard inserts. This is JUST beadboard.

My friends ceiling isn't painted. She put some type of sealant on it to protect it before putting it up so it's natural in color. Looks really good in her older home with the high ceilings and crown molding.

Arcy....THAT is beautiful!

Beadboard is cheap junk....it's paneling you buy it in sheets. People put beadboard on their walls as wainscotting and around kitchen islands. Link to see it up close

Hmmm. What about plank ceiling? Is that different? I don't want cheap junk!

Real beadboard is not cheap junk these days. It is expensive. Back in the day the beading was to make the board lie flat. Beadboard was made from scrap and used to create ceilings and walls. Traditionally it would be covered with tacked on cheesecloth and wall paper was adhered to that if the person could afford paper. Real beadboard is not a sheet of ply with beading added. It is individual slats of wood. It can be double width-two widths of wood with a bead in the middle or single-narrow boards where the beading is the edge. My grannies family home had the narrow less expensive. A cheap wall/ceiling in it's day it was like being in a jewel box. Gorgeous molassas colored heart pine with nary a knot to be seen. I lost a house to fire that had the most fabulous beaded ceilings. You cant imagine how lux it looked. You cant even get the wood now as the trees are gone. You have to buy salvage and like heart pine flooring costs the very earth.

Beadboard is $72 a sheet @ Home Depot. Same price as a sheet of plywood.

Tongue n' groove planking.....can be exotic...natural and beautiful! We used white cedar planking for our deck ceiling. Spent several thousand dollars on materials. If it had been engineered heartwood=without knots.....it would have been three times that! A bowling alley floor as arcy showed.....is really nice HIGH QUALITY wood. ♥ A gorgeous alternative to beadboard.

Where would you buy real beadboard?

“maddielee....that's NOT just beadboard. Beadboard is 3" wide. That's a panelled ceiling with beadboard inserts. This is JUST beadboard.”

Did you miss the word ’faux’ in my post?

Annegriet.....patriciae is suggesting you build it....a carpenter would cost a fortune to build something from scratch....she's right. That's why Home Depot sells sheets of it. Reminds me of the old brown wood paneling everyone put up in the '70's.

I love beadboard. I have a pine beadboard bed (Moosewood, made in Maine), beadboard kitchen cabinets, and a laundry alcove with beadboard walls and ceiling. But my house, an 1860 farmhouse, is very different from yours. My beadboard is 1-5/8" wide.

You can buy salvaged beadboard. You can buy it made in short sections (about four or five feet) from specialty lumber stores that is made to do wainscoting. I have some of that is this house. I lost a small fortune in beadboard from a Victorian I was renovating in the south. The ceilings had been dropped to 10 feet in bedrooms and a couple of entry halls and we removed the beadboard from above in the attic. A hot dirty job that yielded 16 ft lengths of mostly clear aprox 3 in wide double width boards. Beautiful stuff stacked on porches that burned with the house. I am sure you can buy long lengths of it but it will be seriously expensive. The wide stuff cost more back in the day because it was easier to use than the narrow like Alisande has. All installed it looks the same. And you can make it. You need a shaper and specialty beading heads and the narrow thin planks. I have a shaper and the cutting heads.

Since my house is 185 years old, I gotta think the beadboard in my large powder room ceiling and back porch is authentic. It's 3 inches painted white. We put shiplap in the upstairs bathroom painted white. The rest of the house has horsehair plaster.

This is a Bertch beadboard vanity I used in one of my remodels, in 2014. Bertch is a made-to-order supplier. High end. I can just look at the wood and appreciate the quality. The top is Cambria. The sink is Ikea, The faucet is Kohler.

If you just hired a contractor to install beadboard....this is not what you'd get.

When I see beadboard, I think of dirt. I just don't understand the aesthetic of something that would trap extra dust and grunge. At least a vanity can be easily cleaned, but a ceiling?

We have original beadboard ceilings in our lake house, the wood is Douglas fir. The house is 125 years old and it still looks wonderful as do the original floors. The house was an inn on a lake with little houses for renting plus a tea room. We kept three of the houses and made one my studio, a boathouse, and a storage house. If I were you, I would shop around and choose exactly what YOU want.

Oh, Jupidupi, you would hate my house! Beadboard is pristine compared to my rough hemlock walls. Add our dirt road and three shedding cats, and you would loathe it! :-)

Beadboard was not usually meant to be seen. The beading was to make the thin wood lie flat and not cup, In a high end home it was covered in tacked on rough cloth that might be gessoed to look like plaster or paper was pasted on to the fabric. It was the dry wall of its day. Nicer than the rough planks that were often used as well. Replaced by fiberboard for a short period . The grunge in my house was a century of flyspecks. I had to take down all the boards from the ceiling of what was to become the living room and clean them with alcohol.

I've lived in old houses with beadboard and visited in old houses with beadboard. While I do understand the basic charm of it, I don't care for how it apparently can age. In the old houses where I've seen it, there were too often gaps that looked messy, uhm, or even dilapidated. Maybe it took a hundred years of settling and shifting for such gaps to develop; I don't know. But I so associate beadboard with a house needing repair, that I wouldn't want to add it into my house.

How could I forget I also have a fairly primitive old beadboard cabinet in my kitchen? It honors women in my family who have passed on. I need to do some rearranging. Empty frames in back of the cat (below, center) await photos of the daughters of my mother's sisters at lower right and the daughter of my father's sister at upper right. Lousy image I just snapped with an old phone.

Alisande--I LOVE THAT!

We had narrow beadboard ceilings on the porch on the house on the bayou, and regular beadboard in the bathroom and kitchen....sort of like wainscoating. It wasn't the kind that came in sheets like paneling. It was the individual boards

Traditional for those porch ceilings was blue paint.

Yes. Ours was painted sky blue. It is supposed to confuse the mud daubers and keep them from building their mud nests on it.

Huh, I would have thought it was painted blue to be like the sky!

Yes, the blue was to make the critters think it WAS sky! Also to deter the birds from building nests as well.

I love bead board ceilings. Go with what you like Annie.

Arcy that is just gorgeous!!

Uh, and the blue, "haint blue" (spirit or ghost blue), was also supposed to confuse spirits with malintentions. I guess they might fly up to what they thought was the sky, but bump their immaterial heads and be knocked unconscious.

It worked better on the mud daubers....there were many mysterious/curious things that happened on that place and in that old house. I would say it did not confuse the spirits.

Ooo, interesting..... Sounds like a thread I'd like to read!