Ceiling the Deal

This is the kitchen ceiling. When you go into the kitchen your eye can't help but go up to the grossness...which is why I like to have a bunch of colorful, eye catching clutter all over the counters.

Sure some of this is because we had to rip the cabinet(s) out of the wall but most of it is because of the time the tub upstairs was left going ALL DAY LONG while the previous owners lived there. Spray paint is a terrible drug, ya'll.

We've really been sweating what to do with the ceiling. 

At first we thought we'd get cute ceiling tiles. That was before we realized that they are generally more expensive than our floor. They can be $12-$40 a square foot. Insanity. I've got HGTV Dreams on a Dollar Tree Budget.

We thought we could use linoleum tiles with raised patterns and paint them white to mimic ceiling tiles. Where's some 1970's linoleum when you need it.

We were going to go the paintable wallpaper as beadboard ceiling route. It would've been about $350 and a big pain.

We were going to do legit beadboard! But then we realized that we'd have weird seams so we were going to make a coffered ceiling. Price again played a factor.

Then we thought we'd rip thin wood and white wash it to create sort of a farmhouse-y ceiling. The price was right at about $0.70 a square ft but it would be a ton of labor.

My dad had a genius idea to use vinyl soffits for the ceiling. Cheap and easy to install! Looks like planks! It was about the same price as the thin wood. Then we started thinking about vinyl and that lead us to...laminate floor!

We are lucky that we live in a spot with a ton of options for cheap laminate. We have Ollies, Lumber Liquidators and Surplus Warehouse all in this area. We were able to score Donar Oak laminate for $0.50 a sq ft from Lumber Liquidators. We figured that if we didn't like the color we could just paint it.

The DIY Gods were smiling on us the day I ordered because when the laminate arrived it looked so much lighter in person. NO NEED TO PAINT! It looks like barn wood.  I could hear B when he was loading it, "This looks pretttty good!" and I couldn't wait to get home and take a peek.

Have cat will basket. Pommy looks lusciously portulent here, don't you think? He's been napping in all sorts of weird places lately.

So that's our plan for the ceiling. Fingers crossed!! I'm really eager to get this done.