For this weekend’s work, Karen’s parents were in town so I took advantage of their time and offer to help with the ceiling. Karen’s dad has experience wiring up fixtures which was very helpful because I won’t touch electricity at all. When we first started, it was relatively easy as we just had to continue putting up planks. But we soon reached the tricky part of cutting out holes for the AC register and the light fixture. Karen’s step-mom helped with organizing the cuts so that we were able to notch the boards out to fit around the AC register.

Working around the light fixture was a little more tricky because once we removed the existing fixture, it became clear that what was there was not worth salvaging for a new light. The box was supported by a bunch of bent screws and it was jammed into a piece of 2x4 in an awkward manner. Since we were doing this the right way, we made a trip to Home Depot to pick up a new fixture box to neatly hold the wires and also give us a stable mounting base.

We were able to attach the new box between the joists and then cleanly threaded the wires through for the new fixture. After that was set up, we used the box as a template to cut out a hole in the board that would fit over the fixture box. Well, I didn’t do any of this and mostly watched as Karen’s parents handled this part. Once they finished, we had nice cutouts where the AC and light fixtures go and then were able to finish up the ceiling with ease. We had a few issues at the last board due to a soffit in the room, but it just required ripping a small board to fill in a gap.

As we admired the ceiling, we started thinking about new crown molding for the perimeter. The problem is that the angle of the ceiling is not 90 degrees which makes it hard to calculate the cuts for someone who’s not used to cutting trim. We found a large enough trim to cover the gaps between the shiplap and plaster walls, but I think for this install, I’m going to outsource to a carpenter.

Lastly I taped up some joints between the drywall and plaster. Things are looking ready for priming and painting next weekend.