Wondering how to raise ceiling height and make your room look bigger? I’m sharing what we did — the thing that 97% of people never even think about as a way to create the “illusion” of more space!
Oh, what a difference a foot makes! 😍
If you have a certain room that you cannot make any larger in width or depth, yet you reeeeeally want it to
truly look + feel larger
…then I hear you wholeheartedly! And I have a solution to share with you that 97% of people have NEVER considered.
PS: Is a contractor telling you it’s impossible, or that it’ll cost you $30,000 to do it?!? We’re here to show you what we did to raise our ceiling for low cost…and it was reasonably easily!
ceiling BEFORE:
Granted, you may or may not be a candidate for this genius shortcut…but take a look and see if you are!
We couldn’t enlarge our downstairs bathroom because of the rooms that were on either side (one of our living rooms was on the left, and our guest room/office was to the right, so what were we to do?
HOW TO RAISE A CEILING IN A HOUSE
First, What “Solutions” We Did NOT Do!
To make a room like this appear bigger, the usual internet searches will tell you to do things like
- “Add natural light” (But what if you can’t, like we couldn’t?)
- “Paint your room a certain color” (the sheen is actually just as if not more important but that’s another story)
- “Fill your room with mirrors” (eek! watch out for that!)
- “Use a large-scale wallpaper” (wallpapering a bathroom with moisture is NOT like regular wallpapering…)
- “Improve your lighting!” (Don’t even get me started on how adding MORE artificial light is not always the answer…and I have a post on bathroom lights HERE.)
More problems:
- We could not add skylights because this bathroom was on the first floor, with one of our secondary bedrooms and bathrooms right above it.
- We could not add windows because there was a much-used closet in our guest room/office between the shower wall and the outside wall!
raising a ceiling before and after
Brilliance Hits!
Angels sang as the heavens opened, a beam of light piercing the clouds to shine directly onto Matt and I as we looked at each other blissfully and realized the solution to our problem.
(That was fun to type! If you can’t entertain yourself, life has no meaning…)
In reality, it was the usual: Jess had a brainwave and asked Matt for his pro reality check on its physical possibility.
What happened was that I realized while the rest of our downstairs had 8′ ceilings, for some reason the bathroom was only 7′.
raising ceiling height before and after
Raising Our Ceiling By 1 Foot: “What’s Inside?”
“What is up there?” I wondered. “Why does it ‘need’ to be at 7 feet?”
Answer:
- There was some lighting.
- There was an HVAC air supply running both to the bathroom and then to the fireplace room on the other side of the left wall. (I’ll show you this in a pic below so you can see what we did for that vent in the living room!)
- There was an exhaust vent for the bathroom fan.
That was it.
That, my friend, is what Matt and I call sweet news!
Because let me tell you, we love seeing those type of things. 9 times out of 10, they’re an easy “fix.”
(Same for the kitchen. We raised our ceilings there too! See “5 Ways We Made Our Kitchen Look Bigger!”)
how to raise ceiling height
Don’t Forget: Your Other Rooms Might (Seriously) Matter!
To give you another perspective, let’s look at the other side of that left bathroom wall from the living room.
This is BEFORE we moved in and the prior owners were still living there:
See the vent above their cabinet? With the awesome way they put their crown molding around it? (FACE PALM!)
We’re going to move that vent into the ceiling, and then it will look like this:
Sidenote: this living room gets SUCH LOW LIGHT, so you can see how we addressed that in this post!
raising ceiling height
Be Aware of What You’re In For: Easy, Difficult or Medium?
Here’s a closer look at what was happening in that bathroom ceiling on that side:
One of the most frequent things we love helping people with when they call us for help is when they’re being told something by a workman or contractor like
- “Oh, that’ll be $20k to do that ceiling…” (They’re banking on you not knowing it’s really fairly easy.)
- “You can’t do it because of X (pipes, wires, etc) running through there.” (So many are unfortunately talented at making something simple sound really complicated so they can charge you 3-4x times — if not more — as much as it should be.)
- “You’ll have to rip out everything!” or “It can’t be done at all!” (Often untrue!)
So we’re sharing what we did with you to help de-mystify the situation for you. 😉
how to raise a ceiling in a house
Bonus Tip: Keep All 4 Walls In Mind!
You’ll want to check out all 4 walls and where anything from the ceiling is going through.
For example, here’s what was happening above the door from the downstairs hallway into our bathroom. For us, this was a vent going to the laundry room connecting with the exhaust vent and outside vent. We repositioned this duct above the new ceiling.
raise ceiling height
Showing You Behind the Walls!
When we removed the drywall to the left of the sink, we saw that an old medicine cabinet had been covered over. We didn’t reinstate it because we didn’t need that function in this downstairs bathroom.
PS: You can ignore this box because it’s the old exhaust fan Matt set there temporarily. 🙂
Here are the water pipes (one for this bathroom’s sink and one set going to the bathroom right above it) behind the wall. We didn’t have to move any of this — and you shouldn’t either because it’s all in your wall and not your ceiling!
Related to this, we’re sharing The #1 Mistake We Made In This Bathroom Remodel (it has to do with the water 😉 )…
can you raise ceiling height
For Those Who Ask, “Can You Raise Ceiling Height?”
The fast answer is a resounding YES! You can absolutely raise the ceiling in your home, but we’ll talk more about the questions you need to ask first before deciding whether it’s worth it to you or not.
PS: Stay tuned for our next house because we are DEFINITELY going to be analyzing ceiling height. Get on our Insider’s List to see when that post goes live! (And get our Home Design Guide for free today while you’re at it.)
RAISING CEILING IN BATHROOM
How It Looks After!
Here you can see we’ve (and by “we” I mean Matt!)
- Moved the ceiling up from 7′ to 8′ (you’ll really see the difference when I show you the Before next to the After)!
- Moved the vent (and replaced the old one with a new fan).
- Adjusted the HVAC ducts into the new ceiling level.
- Got new lighting and raised that into the new ceiling level.
We’ll soon put a post together showing you the “Beauty Shots” of how this bathroom turned out…
…and in the meantime, you MUST read this to save yourself! Maybe we were just elated by the incredible transformation this ceiling height raising gave us, but it’s The #1 Mistake We Made In This Bathroom Remodel!
cost to raise roof 2 feet
“What’s the Cost to Raise Ceiling Height?”
As for the question, “How much does it cost to raise a ceiling 1 foot?” or even 2 feet, that will depend on
- Your room measurements (height, width)
- Whether the room is on the ground floor or second story
- What type of ceiling is above
- What electrical, venting, or plumbing is above your ceiling
On the low side, if you DIY it like we did, in a 5’x9′ space, it could cost approximately $500-$1,000 to raise your ceiling height in a room like a bathroom or closet that size. Keep in mind we outlined above what other factors were in our ceiling that we had to deal with.
On the high side, if you’re doing a 2,000 sq foot space on average and hiring it out, it could cost you anywhere from $10,000-$45,000 depending on the factors we listed above, as well as the area of the country you live in. (Our costs in southern California, for example, are often much higher than the costs found in areas of the country with lower cost of living.)
Next…
While you’re waiting to see the full final design and how this bathroom finished out, you’ll definitely want to learn from our error in The #1 Mistake We Made In This Bathroom Remodel!
You’ll also enjoy
- Everything about our primary bathroom remodel!
- Make life easier! Use our 7 Strategies for Choosing Interior Colors!
- The 5 ways we made our kitchen look bigger!
- Our bathroom looks huge with THIS in it now!
- How we got our high-end bathroom floor tile design for (almost) free!
PS: See all our home projects organized by room HERE!
PPS: Be the first to know when a new ceiling-raising post goes up by joining our Insider’s List HERE! (FREE Design Guide for you there too!)
