UNDER THE ROOF
Floors get more attention than almost anything. Should they be oak or cherry or pine? Do we need a rug in this room, carpeting in that? How about tile for the entryway and bathroom? Bricks for the umbrarium? Maybe birch in the baby’s room would be nice...
And then they get cleaned. For those with BHG houses, everything is always clean. But for the clean challenged, it’s the floor that gets the attention. Someone’s coming over? Clean the floors: sweep, scrub, vacuum, mop, polish, wax. There, doesn’t that look nice? Everything else can be carted away and put in closets, the basement, the spare bedroom. Whew, we’re ready!
Walls get virtually no thought. There is the Great Hassle Over Color before painting, but then it’s settled, a color or colors are chosen and out come the brushes and rollers, or else real painters with their brushes and their rollers and their cool professional equipment.
The walls are painted once, and then they are left alone. Perhaps a painting or photograph arrives, and then Uncle Podger comes in to hang it. But that’s a short-term hue and cry, not oft repeated. Walls tend to either fill up, or else reach some sort of equilibrium level of art and memories, and then remain mostly static.
And what gets the least amount of thought, the least consideration, what portion of the house is almost totally ignored until some problem or calamity brings it to our attention? The ceiling. I’d say the lowly ceiling, except that ceilings are up, not down, and lowly suggests, well, low. But we all know what I mean– the undervalued, underappreciated, unnoticed elephant in any room is the room’s most important plane, its ceiling.
Alright, maybe not *the* most important plane, but very close, second only to the windows and their view. If there are no windows with views, then ceilings become numero uno. Ceilings make the room-- ceilings complete the job.
The whys and wherefores of ceilings have concerned me for more than thirty years. I’ve lived in houses where plaster ceilings failed in a manner that could only be called spectacular and catastrophic. When an entire plaster ceiling comes down, if one is anywhere in the building, one knows Something Has Happened, Probably Something Bad. Though a plaster ceiling might look like white mist up above, it is essentially a fairly thick layer of cement, suspended by thin bits of iron which have been slowly decaying since the day they were first driven into the wood above. And when enough of those tiny bits of iron reach the end of their useful lives, this thing called gravity, which the tiny iron bits have been fighting night and day, day and night for decades, claims victory at last, down comes the whole shebang in a tremendous, house-shaking, alarm-raising crash! It is an event which draws attention to the ceiling, in a big, big way.
There was a time when on paper I was studying politics and history and several other subjects, but a closer look would have found me looking up. I was reading not the tedious books assigned, but incredible books about how buildings were designed and constructed. Handiness with a pocketknife led me past locked doors to the attics and crawl spaces above some of the greatest lecture halls at Harvard University, halls designed by some of the best and brightest of architects.
In the following thirty years I’ve had occasion to design and build structures that have included, among other architectural features, ceilings. I’ve built rooms with ceilings both flat and cathedral, in heights ranging from around eight feet to more than sixteen. Some have been paneled with wood, others have been painted plaster. But always, the ceiling has been if not the main consideration, then certainly something close to it.
Now I’m coming up on the commencement of what might be my last project that involves a domestic ceiling– a second story addition that will allow me to magically transform one small bathroom into two larger bathrooms! And with nothing up my sleeves... Even before the first board has been ordered, the first hammer blow fallen, the first nail driven I can see the ceilings in both of these rooms, get a sense of the dimensionality they will bestow. Ceilings, above all (so to speak) create and define a volume. And I have high hopes for this construction... Stay tuned, there should be more.
