Living Room Redesign (cabinets and coffers)

Limited to six pics up top, so here are some additional of the cabinets:

Woot!!! Awesome work!

Very nice so far. You did some lovely work. Thanks for sharing.

Any pictures of the coffered ceiling during construction? I plan to put a coffered ceiling in my home office and am doing research/design now.

-- Scott in Texas

thx guys/

Scott, I do. They are on my home computer, I will dig them up and post them. So you know, the room is large, I think 23’ x 16’ and I needed to cheat the eye a bit since the windows and fireplace are on center. I wanted to line the long run cofferes up roughly equal with the fireplace so it did not look like the room was offset. This became difficult bc I put in a 1’ soffit on one side (I thought about the same deal on the other side, but bc of the way the bay window sits, it would not look right. So to cover up the lack of symetry, I decided to do different sized openings. I think it worked out as planned and everything is pleasing to the eye.

But in general, once I had the design on paper, I snapped chalk lines all the way across the ceiling; nailed 2×4’s with construction adhesive to the ceiling.

One way I saw suggested to build out is to build the open box of the coffer on the ground and nail or screw it up. Well, again due to the size of the room, I decided to do it the hard way and actually route the edge grain of the wood to give it more dimension, which lead to the need to miter all the intersections to fit properly. Total pita but worth it depaneding on the size you are working with. So I then cut a channel in the side to slide a 1/4” piece of MDF in to make the bottom of the box.

I used a double crown to give it again more dimension (first layer was a baseboard flipped up-side-down and then used I think a 4.5” crown as the final piece. I have put up wider crown before and hate doing it bc it is difficult with a standard finish nailer.

I had primed everything before putting it up, then caulked/filled the gaps and nail holes and finally sprayed everything with two coats of semi-gloass. Oh then painted the openings to the ceiling with standard ceiling paint.

Lots of blood and sweat but well worth it in the end. I will post the in process pics up for you to kind of highlight some of these points, but I am more than happy to answer any questions too.

Looking great, by far. Update us when it’s done.

Beautiful workmanship. Did you spray the paint?

-- Love thy neighbour as thyself

I did spray everything. I liken it to doing surgery with an axe… gets the job done but messy as hell. Regardless, it gives such a great glass-like finish with no brush strokes that it is well worth it. It was one of the corded one-piece sprayers not the hplv setups hooked to a compressor. It only handled a quart at a time and it did require a lot of refilling, but was easy to use and cleanup was simple.

Ok, as requested, here are some progress pics on the ceiling. As you can see in the last pic, I took a somewhat non-traditional route and did 9 openings that are largely different sizes. The 4 corners are approximately equal, but otherwise, they are purposely different. This was to compensate for how the coffers would fall relative to the room and allow me to cheat the soffit while not allowing the eye to find obvious imbalance in the room.

I actually tore the upper molding that was on the wall off and saved it; it was then repurposed into the doors on the cabinets… saved quite a bit doing that.

WOW… amazing work.

You have done a fantastic job. I love the molding build up.

-- Dan I.G.N.

Wonderful room transformation! Thanks for sharing the details. Looking forward to seeing the completed room.

L/W

-- Jesus is the ONLY reason for ANY season.

thx all. The drawers are done and installed. Here are some pics of the drawers (ignore the “I voted” stickers my daughter found fitting to put there :-p I was happy that they were square, fit and pulled smoothly.