Bathroom Alcove Ceiling

This page describes one of the phases of the multi-year Master Bathroom Remodeling Project.

With the main ceiling and sink recess remodeling phases completed, the basic construction technique was now well understood. Mahogany slats would be screwed into a 1/2'' backing board, and the backing board screwed to the ceiling joists.

This alcove ceiling had interesting geometry due to the shower door's 45 degree orientation and the curving wall of the main part of the master bedroom. The light and exhaust fan combination was also in the middle of this, so the two pieces of backing board I needed to cut had very odd shapes. It took a few attempts to test install it to get all the dimensions right.

Given the strange geometry and obstacles, it was a little tricky to decide how to lay out the slats so that I was not left with thin/fragile pieces or a large gap at the end. Once layed out, I found the ceiling was about an inch too short to accomodate an exact number of 1x4 slats. Rather than have one slat thinner that the others, I employed a trick that would also serve another design purpose.

If I took 1/16'' off of each slat's width, then I would have an exact number of slats to fill from one edge to the other. This would be much more visually pleasing than to see some truncated, thinner slat at one of the edges. Since this alcove area's ceiling is lower than the main ceiling, this would also look visually similar to the main ceiling slat widths due to the difference in depth perspective.

After deciding to rip each slat down by 1/16 of an inch, I rough cut all the slats and mounted them to the backing boards. The backing boards had all the markings on them from the test install, so I knew exactly where the walls and other obstacles would be. I could then transfer those markings onto the slats and cut them to their final dimensions fairly precisely.

The curvature of the wall left a small sliver of ceiling that extended toward the sink. It would look odd to have a plain piece of ceiling when there were wooden slats on all other ceiling surfaces. I always think it is the small little details like this which separate good work from mediocre work.

Nex came the tedious, but necessary sanding and polyurethane finishing. The backing board would be barely visible, but still needed to be stained a dark color and sealed with polyurethane.

Note that this project was done in conjunction with the display shelf project, so the picture of the finishing work show pieces from both projects.

As I did with the main ceiling, I left the slats off the backing boards where I needed to screw into the ceiling joists. I would them position the missing slats, then crawl up into the attic to screw from the reverse side so that no screws would be visible.

The first mistake was not accounting for the additional curvature that the sink ceiling produced. The special small sliver of ceiling I made had the last piece jutting out in a very unattractive matter. The fix for this was simple though: just cut a new piece and cut the needed angle.

The second mistake required a lot more labor to correct. One of the slats that ran by the ceiling light/fan needed to be notched about a half inch so that the cover could sit flat against the backing board. In all my measuring and cutting of the slats, I forgot to make this cut. I should have caught this when I did the test installation. However, I never did attempt to put the cover on the light when it was pre-installed so I did not uncover the problem then. It was only after the final installation, when I thought I was done and installed the cover that I found this mistake. If you look closely at the picture at right, you can see that the cover is sitting over the slats on one side while it is recessed beneath them on the other side.

Correcting this mistake was a pain because I had to go back up into the attic, unscrew the slat, take it back to the garage for cutting/re-finishing and then repeat the installation process with yet another trip in the attic. This had to be done over days since it involved waiting for polyurethane coats to dry.

The backing boards were visible along the curved ends and the generally curved geometry meant this all had to be clean up appearance-wise. Spackle to the rescue. The goal was to make the extra 1/2'' of backing board edge look as if it was part of the original wall.

There was a sizable gap due to the strange geometry between the ceiling and the shower enclosure. I needed to make a trim piece that had 3 different thicknesses to be able to make this transition look smooth. There was the original ceiling, the new slatted ceiling and the shower ceiling that were at different levels. I had to glue two pieces of 3/4'' wood together first so that I had a thick enough piece to span all this.