Our very old farmhouse was built in pieces, and the kitchen (and therefore wood stove) got moved as the house got added on to. That means we had not one but two chimney holes in ceilings to deal with. We’ve yet to deal with the one in our daughter’s bedroom, but the kitchen ceiling we did tackle.
That photo above is what we had left AFTER we pulled down the old chimney, pulled the sheet rock off the walls, and stripped all the paper and nails off of the ceiling. You can see some flashing that was around the old chimney, and the brown tarp was part of our effort to keep water out, since the roof also had a hole in it once the chimney came down. The good news was, it was easy for the electricians to run the wiring at least!
Below are some photos of the hole today. Here’s what we did: We found a piece of antique ceiling tin (actually, a friend found a piece of antique ceiling tin) that was painted pink and cream. I spent hours and hours and hours (and hours!) trying to sand and strip all of the paint off, because my original vision was for a piece of shiny tin, not painted tin. When I finally got it to the state you see it in now, I said, “Forget it! We’re going with the antique-y look!”
The idea was to put a piece of tin over the hole so the kitchen table could be centered under it and it would look like it was supposed to be there.
First, we had to tackle the wall. We pulled planks off of a wall upstairs and used those to make a “new” plank wall out of old boards. When we ran out, we pulled apart an old sheep feeder in the barn and used that for the rest of the planks. The planks got primed and caulked and painted. (And you’ll see we need to caulk and paint again. Heating our house with a wood stove has meant a lot of the caulking needs to be redone, both in this wall and in the four ceilings we restored. Sigh…)
We got the ceiling all scraped, sanded, caulked and painted (see really good before and after pictures of the kitchen ceiling). Then a friend got this tin up (while my husband was deployed) and put trim around it. I painted and caulked. Then we put the kitchen table under it, centered just right, and voila! You’d never know there was a chimney there nor a huge hole!!
Although it’s not a very clear photo, you can see the detail in the tin a little better in this photo above.
We are far from done with this renovation, but it’s good for me to look at these before and after photos to remind myself how far we’ve come! And now as our Pacific Northwet spring begins to finally warm up and dry out, it has been really nice to turn our attention to starting a small farm at last, since that’s why we bought this place in the first place. Then this winter, we’ll get back to the renovating and get this old farmhouse ever closer to DONE.
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