Project description
Our living room is about eighteen square metres and the ceiling is two metres seventy. The room came out correct and completely empty: a flat white slab with nothing for the eye to hold on to. What I am after is a warm, slightly rustic character — three cross beams running across the room, boxes built from board, roughly 15 by 18 centimetres in section, spaced the way you suggest after measuring. The surface should keep visible plane marks and light ageing, no aggressive wire brushing, tinted to a dark walnut and finished with matt oil, so the timber reads as texture rather than gloss.
Let me state the points that matter to me and are not open for discussion. The beam is decorative: it is a hollow box made of boards, it carries nothing and never will. No swings, hanging chairs, punching bags or heavy chandeliers may be fixed to it — anything heavy is a separate structure and a separate conversation. Fixing goes to embedded battens screwed into the structural slab, not into the suspended ceiling: plasterboard holds only itself. One beam has to hide the cable for a pendant lamp above the table, and that cable is run by an electrician, in corrugated conduit, with the joints left reachable through a hatch or a removable bottom board; buried twisted joints I will not accept. And last: timber moves when the air goes dry, we run a convector all winter, so the material must sit in the room and acclimatise before installation, and the box has to be assembled with room to move instead of being pinned dead at every joint.
What I would like to see in your reply:
— experience: photos of two or three similar ceilings, ideally aged and dark-tinted;
— the species and drying of the board you propose, and what you tint and oil it with;
— how you close the joint against the walls so there are no gaps or wedges;
— what weight the battens will genuinely take and how many go into each beam;
— the sequence of work, including the survey and the layout marked on the ceiling before anything is fixed;
— dust control: cutting outside or with extraction, protection of the finished floor, cleaning up after yourself;
— your timeline in days and a cost breakdown by stage, materials apart from labour.
Let me state the points that matter to me and are not open for discussion. The beam is decorative: it is a hollow box made of boards, it carries nothing and never will. No swings, hanging chairs, punching bags or heavy chandeliers may be fixed to it — anything heavy is a separate structure and a separate conversation. Fixing goes to embedded battens screwed into the structural slab, not into the suspended ceiling: plasterboard holds only itself. One beam has to hide the cable for a pendant lamp above the table, and that cable is run by an electrician, in corrugated conduit, with the joints left reachable through a hatch or a removable bottom board; buried twisted joints I will not accept. And last: timber moves when the air goes dry, we run a convector all winter, so the material must sit in the room and acclimatise before installation, and the box has to be assembled with room to move instead of being pinned dead at every joint.
What I would like to see in your reply:
— experience: photos of two or three similar ceilings, ideally aged and dark-tinted;
— the species and drying of the board you propose, and what you tint and oil it with;
— how you close the joint against the walls so there are no gaps or wedges;
— what weight the battens will genuinely take and how many go into each beam;
— the sequence of work, including the survey and the layout marked on the ceiling before anything is fixed;
— dust control: cutting outside or with extraction, protection of the finished floor, cleaning up after yourself;
— your timeline in days and a cost breakdown by stage, materials apart from labour.
Other / Miscellaneous Cash, Bank transfer
