How to create a DIY grid ceiling

12th October 2022

Front Porch Properties Rachael Turner is a QBCC licensed builder who turned to Intrim Mouldings to deliver the large amount of quality timber moulding detailing required for this statement home. Read on as she shows you how to create a DIY grid ceiling.

How to create a grid ceiling. Tips, tricks and design hints to get the look.

You may have seen that we had created a more formal coffered ceiling in our Cape Cod Project back in 2020, but for this little beach shack, I wanted to design something special but a lot more paired back to help bring in those coastal vibes. I knew in my head what I wanted but headed to Pinterest for some added inspiration and settled on a mix between the below 2 images.

Here are our inspo pics of how it all started.

I then drew up a rough sketch/chicken scratch of how I envisaged the ceiling to look/work.

Once I was happy with the general concept of my chicken scratch and we knew the sizes of all our Intrim products that we were using, we started out creating a digital version for
our installation team.

For the ceiling boards themselves, we used Intrim VJ Board Pro 100 in their largest available size (5400 x 1214mm). First up we needed to make sure that we centred a full sheet inline with the hallway, from here, we worked our way outwards to the walls. The below diagram shows the butt join and this is the guideline/starting point for the whole grid design, it shows our install team where we would have full sheets and where we should trim out with offcuts, it is also the guideline as to how to space the grids as the first batten to go down is the one that covers the butt join.

For the actual grid design itself, I knew I wanted rectangles of approximately 1.5m x 1m, so in our pre-calculations, we made sure we had drawn in the outside batten trim detail and then divided the space between the butt join and the outside trim to work out the exact sizes to ensure all the grids were evenly spaced.

For the actual design itself, we always head straight to Intrim’s DAR battens, this time we worked with DAR/135mm x 18mm FJ Pine and for our inlay mould we went with the simple detailing of IN33, this inlay moulding helps to show off the design and it just finishes it off beautifully.

Having the diagram pinned up on site was a handy reference point for our installers to check their measurements to make sure we achieved the exact look we were after.

Here’s how it turned out, we were beyond happy with the result and our client just loved it, they honestly couldn’t believe it was the same house they left us with.