Laundry Room Beadboard Drop Ceiling

Spring is in the air, and that means that Rob is going stir crazy to start some sort of project.  We have the basic run of the mill laundry room. It has the ever so beautiful florescent box light fixture. This hasn't worked in over a year, because we wanted to replace it at some point instead of buying more florescent tubes to fix it. We just had our old floor lamp in there until this week.  The pictures are done with our phones mostly because it was easier for us in the time we had to take them.

Rob came up with an idea of how to update the lovely drop ceiling already in there. We knew we couldn't do a normal ceiling due to all the pipes that run above it to our three bathrooms and laundry room. And with the amount of water issues and leaks that we have in our home it was a good idea to keep it like the drop ceiling we already have.  Rob got out his pad and pencil and drew a design he thought he wanted to work on. 

First we took out the existing light fixture, ceiling tiles and metal brackets.  

The next step was framing out the new ceiling, and that way the bead board ceiling would have something to rest on.  Rob placed 1 x 6 pre-primed pine around the edges of the ceiling. This was basically in the same spot at the original drop ceiling.   Please obviously excuse the cords and pipes.  This is obviously why we needed a drop ceiling to remain in this room.

Here you can see around the edges of the ceiling where Rob has the 1 x 6 pieces in place. 

We needed a place to put our router due to the location it needed to be in. Instead of having it on the shelf or shelves we are installing later, Rob chose to hide them up on the ceiling. He used bolts to attach a piece of leftover wood to serve as a shelf inside the ceiling.

The sheets of beadboard were purchased from Lowe's along with the foam they are lined with to help with lessening the noise from the washer and dryer. Then he placed the pieces in their frame just as you would a typical drop ceiling. This just looks nicer than those 80's looking panels we had before.  Here is a view from below. You can see he added a bit of trim modeling around the edges of the beadboard that had not been painted yet in this picture.

He bought this light from Lowe's for $40.  It is so much better than our former light fixture. The light it provides for this window less space is great.

Here is some detailed information on how Rob went about assembling and building the ceiling:

We started by ripping 2 x 4's in half (you could use 2 x 2's) and screwing them to the wall 3/4" above where we wanted the ceiling to be.  While taking the old drop ceiling down I took a pencil and traced the bottom of the bracket around the room.  After I hung the 2 x 4 I ripped off 3/4" of the 1 x 6 pre-primed pine boards (this gets routed and then tacked back on later).  I screwed them to the 2 x2  using 2 inch drywall screws around the parameter and also placed a eye hook on the part of the board facing the floor joists so that I could add some wire to attach them to the joists later for extra strength (though it didn't need it). 

I attached each of the pine pieces to each other using the Kreg system pocket screws.  I then made the center section roughly the same size as the each of the four quadrants. When I cut the wood for that I also ripped 3/4" off of each side. I then hung that from the floor joists using eye hooks and 55 lbs strength steel wire that your would use for picture hanging. I then measured off the middle of each wall and attached a piece of wood from the center section to the wall (again ripping off 3/4" off of each) attaching to each using pocket screws and hanging with eye hooks. 

I then cut 32 x 48" to fit up in the opening after gluing ridged green foam to the back (to insulate sound) I placed it in the opening.  The 3/4" pieces that i ripped off earlier I routed a profile on the wood we used a Roman Ogee profile.  I cut them to fit the inside edges mitered for 45 and tacked them in.  This is mainly what the bead board sits on.  The idea being that if I need to access whats above the panel I just pop off the routed piece and the panel drops out.  The light in the center with its medallion hold the center bead board up.  

Here is a look at the finished ceiling after a few days of work.  Next up for us is painting the walls, adding new storage solutions and a new floor. This may take us a few weeks (or months) but we will get it done. 

Thanks for stopping by! We look forward to sharing more of this space with you.