Ceiling Makeover Using Ceiling Tiles

For some reason, I sleep really well when we are staying at this house and I find myself spending a good deal of time (probably too much time if I am honest) looking at the ceiling in our bedroom. Making a home with whatever materials you have around means that sometimes you use parts of drywall instead of full sheets and sometimes you run out of paint and texture so you make due with what you have. We have been working on items that really needed to get done and this ceiling in the big scheme of things is really just cosmetic...but I could not stare at this any longer.

I could not decide if we should just texture over it and then paint or if we should fix the lines and just paint. I was thinking that would be really messy and I did not want to remove everything and have to clean the whole room when done. I stumbled across a website with a perfect solution. CEILING TILES! And not just any ceiling tiles...Styrofoam ceiling tiles while are easy to use, lightweight, not that expensive! 

Check out this website: www.antiqueceilings.com. I purchased the bright white but now I have my eye on the ones that look like planks of wood for a different room. These are amazing!

They come with some directions for how to find the middle of your room to start installing. But we just used the light as the middle since we have found that there were not many things that were straight, level, or centered! We used string to align the first middle line of tiles and then built out from there.

Materials needed:
- Ceiling tiles
- Adhesive - We used Loctite Construction Adhesive and you can get the bigger tubes for like $7 each. We used 3 for our ceiling.
- Piece of string
- Ruler
- Razor knife
- Measuring tape
- Damp towel

Here are the steps:

1. HERE COMES THE MATH. Fair warning.  Measure how big your room is and convert that to inches. The ceiling tiles are 20" x 20" (400" total space . Our room was 12 ft by 12 ft roughly. 144"x144" for inches. 20,736 total inches. Divide that by the 400 and it says I would need 52 tiles. For some reason, I only ordered 50. And to completely finish, we need 5 more. So order a few extras. We had barely any waste but we did have to do smaller pieces all around the edges.

2. Either find the middle of your room...or where you want to start. We used the light.

Get goofy because this is going to be fun!

3. Glue. I put a nice little pile in the raised areas and then along the edges. As you place the tiles, some might come around the edges and use the damp towel to wipe that off.

4. Use the string to find the middle of both sides of the wall that goes right in the middle of the fixture location. Ensure that runs down the middle of your first line of tiles.

5. Install that whole row of tiles and continue to install in the same way: start with the middle and fan out.

6. When you get to the edges, measure the distance to the wall and use the metal ruler to make a straight line cut using the razor knife. We put a box under the tile when we cut it so we did not damage the bed!

7. Reinstall the trim if you had any!

I will post some final pictures once the last 5 tiles come in and we get the trim and light fixture back up!