Tray Ceilings

Look up!  Isn't that what your mother always told you? Oh, no, that was stand up straight, anyway...  The ceiling is sometimes referred to as the fifth wall, and although I'm not big on painted ceilings in every room, I do believe they have their uses!  Keeping rain out is always handy.  In our modular home, the ceiling in the dining room is very useful in another way.

If you've decided to build a modular home ask your dealer about the possibility of a tray (or trey) ceiling.  FYI: A tray ceiling is a recessed area like an inverted tray, cut into the actual ceiling, so that the center of the ceiling is higher than the surrounding edge, by about 12".  It’s easy to add during construction and creates architectural interest galore!  I’m not saying add one to each room, but a tray ceiling in your master bedroom or dining room would be very dramatic.

AND tray ceilings are perfect for modular homes because they are very modern looking, and, modular homes are generally modern!  Deep, huh?

Our floor plan is fairly open. As I mentioned we have a very large family and we needed the kitchen, dining room and living room to be open, so that we can all eat and still see one another.



In these two pictures you can kind of see what I mean.  Where the two stools sit, is a bar area to the kitchen.  And below, the view from the bar to the living room and dining room.



However, for nights when its just a few of us, or two of us (yeah right!) we wanted our dining room to have it’s own feel.  The modular home we chose came with a tray ceiling (Shown, but not Included!).  This was the answer to our dilemma.  The tray visually separates the dining room from the rest of the house.  And this makes me happy!

A really pretty way to enhance the tray ceiling is with lighting.  The kind of lighting would depend on you design and decor.  We chose recessed lights in the tray, which are on a dimmer.  We can use either the chandelier, or the recessed lights, or both.

As you can see, I haven’t finished painting my tray ceiling.  I want to highlight and paint the area of the tray where the lights are, a contrasting color to the golds we currently have. And, I am going to, I mean with my husbands blessing, I would like to paint some sort of glaze or mottled look on the actual ceiling.  However, convincing him that this will look amazing, is another story!  I may have to wait til he’s working late, and plan my attack... When that actually happens I will post an update.