Short Ceiling? Tricks For Heightening

Written by Milan Jara on 27th Jan 2015

If you live in an older home, then you may have noticed that the ceilings seem a bit short. When you are jumping off your bed onto the bedroom floor, as our friend is here, then you may have even hit your head a few times. It is not unusual for older homes to have shorter ceilings for a lot of reasons. The biggest reason is simply that people were shorter all of those years ago.

While shorter ceilings can save you money on your energy bills by making the rooms in your home smaller, they can also make you feel a bit cramped. We have a few solutions you can use that will help to create some head room for those magnificent leaps from the bed to the floor.

Short Ceiling

Photo by Christopher (Flickr)

Get Shorter Furniture

This doesn’t help with those magnificent leaps, but it definitely gives the feeling that the room is taller than it really is. Low-profile furniture is not at all unusual, and you will have your choice of designs and colors. It is easy to find low-profile furniture to fit your room decor and add some character to your home.

Use Recessed Lighting

Nothing makes your ceiling seem really low like banging your head on the lighting fixture hanging from said ceiling as you enter the room. The easy solution here is to used recessed lighting and free up all of that ceiling space while protecting your forehead at the same time.

Use Drapes With Busy Designs At The Top

This one was hard to picture until we saw it work with our own eyes. A solid-colored set of drapes with a busy design only at the top actually makes the entire room look taller. It helps if the drapes are a brighter color and the design is darker because the contrast really helps to enhance the effect.

Gloss Your Ceiling

A matte finish to your walls and a glossy finish to your ceiling is going to really set the ceiling off from the rest of the room. But when you use a light-colored paint for both the walls and the ceiling, then the gloss creates an effect that makes it look like your ceiling is much higher than it is. We also use this method to help make smaller bathrooms look larger, but it is actually more effective on making ceilings look taller.

Do Everything Vertically

When you put pictures in a pattern on your low-ceilinged wall, then use a vertical pattern and not a horizontal one. When you install bookshelves in your low-ceilinged room, use narrow bookshelves that are much taller than they are wider. A series of vertical displays on your walls will make it look like your ceiling is much higher up than it really is. Trust us; this one works really well.

We have spent a large portion of our lives installing and remodeling ceilings, and we know how important a good ceiling is to a room. When you have short ceilings, you may start to think that you will have to do some serious remodeling to give yourself at least the illusion of more space. But with a few little tricks, you can turn your short room into a cathedral and make plenty of room for leaping about on the bed.