You wrote: "the ones going across the old ceiling (vs. yanking them out), " What you wrote stood my hair on end! It is very likely you can not remove the horizontal timbers without your house's structure being compromised. Those beams are most likely doing a whole lot more than just supporting the ceiling and the attic floor. They are connecting the sides of your house. Before you even think of this, please hire an architect or structural engineer to assess it. Given the age of your house (1840) and location it seems highly likely your house is a timberframe structure. Those horizontal beams are ESSENTIAL in timberframe houses! The lower ceilings in older houses are one the characteristics of the style. You can expose the beams, but not remove them. After they are exposed you could cover them, but it would be a lot of work. In buildings the age of yours they might be hand hewn, and attractive, but rough. Many people find the old timber look very appealing as they shown the hand-made nature of the structure. The other issue is that once you have a room with such a tall ceiling (going up to the roof rafters) you will kake it very hard to keep warm at "ground level" as all your heated air will go up, far above your head. Even with good roof insulation (can be done, but does present some other technical issues) keeping warm downstairs will be a challenge, unless you have something like radiant heat in the floor. When the house was built, and every bit of heat was from logs cut, hauled, split, stacked and loaded, by the occupants they knew that lower ceilings were warmer than soaring spaces. MOlly

The big question is "How big is your wallet"? If you want to see a premium job, I'd go see a post and beam contractor and talk to them about using stress skin panels, a premim wood post and beam skeleton (cypress, oak, Ipe). showing t&g cedar or yellow pine 1x6 sheathing/ ceiling. It would be beautiful and expensive. To save money, No stress skin and I like the idea of adding an additional layer of 3/4 sheathing over the T&G to keep the roofing nails from popping through. No insulation w/ this method and a total waste of money and time if later on you wanted to make a 3 seasons room out of it and insulate. The other method of attaching the T&G to the unbderside of the traditioal framing system then adding faux rafters gives you some options. I hate t1-11 but in this case it would be better than paneling. Anything would be better than paneling. I still like 1x6 T&G. If you are not going to insulate, I recommend designing in a coupala or some kind of ventalation to keep the heat from gathering up in the ceiling ( may be a good idea no matter what you do).

What Mark said. Let's hope the painter is coming to paint the electrical conduit black...By the way, nice shaping on the rafter tails, which are matched by the smaller rafters over the window in the background. Nice work!

I have one porch ceiling open and one closed. Both look nice, IMO. If the open one were lower, I might object to the roofing nails; but it's well over my head, and the nails are painted over. Who looks a a porch ceiling that often anyway? Both are popular neighborhoods for wasp housing. I guess they appreciate the good nearby grocery shopping (plenty of insects here since I seldom use pesticides). They don't get into the closed ceiling because it's closed (duh) and caulked, but they still build their houses in the corners. Most summers, I get slightly more wasp nests on the open ceiling porch, because with all those open joists, it has more prime improved building sites at very affordable per-square-inch prices. But the difference in numbers is not as large as you'd expect. My deal with wasps is that if they leave me alone, I'll leave them alone, and won't bulldoze and redevelop their neighborhoods until January or February. Some wasps, presumably the young punks, don't respect the arrangement. They die painful chemical-weapon deaths some moonless night at 3am, whether they're on the open-ceiling porch or closed-ceiling porch.