Ceiling heights and popcorn ceilings

[fan-of-fans]

I notice a lot of people on some sites make a big deal of houses having popcorn ceilings. The house I live in was built in 1976, and has popcorn ceilings in all the rooms, except the bathroom and linen closet which have the same texture as the walls.

The popcorn has never really bothered me. My parents had a house built in 1992 and it cost extra to have the knockdown style texture, which they went with instead.

Also I've noticed most of the houses built in the 1960s-70s had 8 foot flat ceilings throughout the house.

In the industry I work in, I've noticed a lot of the newer houses have 9 foot ceilings or higher. Even the small houses with 8 foot often have a vaulted ceiling in the common areas or tray ceilings. Some of the starter homes will have 8'-8" ceilings sometimes.

I wonder why the older houses here starting after WWII all had 8 foot ceilings. Before that many of them had 9 or 10 foot. I think it was only in the high end newer homes that higher ceilings started coming back. Although some of the older ones did have vaulted ceilings.

Where I live has all 8 foot ceilings except the living room which is vaulted. The 8 foot ceilings don't bother me at all, but I think if the living room was flat it would feel a bit boxed in.

 

[philcobendixduo]

My 1967 tract home has "popcorn" ceilings and I love them. They still look great after 52 years, never need painting and help to quiet the rooms. Bathrooms, kitchen, closets and laundry room have same texture as the walls.
BEST of all, the living room and dining room ceilings have SPARKLES (just like stars)!
Perhaps ceiling heights are "up" because people are getting taller?!?
Higher and cathedral ceilings also impart a sense of spaciousness.
My two cents.

 

[iowabear]

Ceiling Height

Never gave it a thought until your post.  I measured and my 1956 ranch has 8 foot ceilings.  I'm 5'8" and it seems perfect to me.  Perhaps if I was 6'4" I'd feel differently.

 

Like a lot of ranch homes from this period, I have a cove ceiling in the living room which is a simple but nice touch.

 

I don't care about popcorn ceilings one way or the other.  I never even thought of it as an issue until the home shows started "shaming" them.

 

 

[frigilux]

I've lived in two places with popcorn ceilings. Didn't mind them at all in the first house (rented), but lived with a heavy smoker in the second one and that was another story. The living room ceiling looked filthy in short order.

Smoking is forbidden in this apartment building. The two smokers have to go stand out on the front or back step. As a tail-end baby boomer, I remember when everyone smoked anywhere they wanted to. Don't miss those days.

At any rate, popcorn ceilings and smokers are a bad mix.

 

[kenwashesmonday]

The reason there's such a fuss about popcorn ceilings is because many of them contain friable asbestos.

 

[xraytech]

My 1946 Cape Cod has 8’2” ceilings throughout, I’m 6’5” and don’t feel closed in at all, probably in part due to the excessive amount of windows in every room. My ceilings are all smooth, the living room has s lot of cracks that had been patched so I think a textured ceiling would look better there.

My guess on the lower ceiling heights in postwar homes had to do with saving materials during the housing boom, as well as saving on fuel costs for heating purposes.
I personally find cathedral ceilings to be a waste of space and waste of heating fuel

 

[petek]

2 of the 3 incl our current house (built 1958) have had cathedral/vaulted ceilings though none of the houses I grew up in did nor did they have popcorn ceilings that I can recall. THe first house we bought built in the 70s had 8ft and popcorn in the livingroom only as did many of the apartments I lived in. Smoking made them look nasty and there was no way to clean them. Our heating bill really isn't any higher than our neighbors who have 9 ft ceilings,, yes we do compare occasionally. I'm actually surprised because it goes against logic and we're not ones to turn the heat down, because we're home everyday all day more or less and it's a boiler

 

[fan-of-fans]

Some of the 1950s MCM style homes here have sloped roofs with beams and the ceiling follows the roof line, with taller windows on the high side.

I've been to some 60s and 70s houses here that had ceilings throughout that were lower than 8 feet. I'd guess they were 7'-6" or 7 foot. That just felt too low for me, for some it might be fine. I have no idea why they did that other than possibly energy savings or to save a row of concrete block.

My grandmother's 1970s duplex had 8 foot ceilings but the kitchen was 7 foot, with 2x4 plastic panels in the middle with fluorescent lights above. Some people took out the panels in their houses and made it into a tray ceiling, since above the panels was an 8 foot ceiling.

I'd agree the postwar housing likely went with 8 foot in order to save lumber on the studs and also wall material. Those were likely the start of mass produced homes and standardization.

Here in FL the older homes likely had higher ceilings so in the summer the heat would rise above the floor better. In the old colonial homes in the NE many of them had quite low ceilings in order to hold the heat down in the harsh winters.

 

[arbilab]

If you're into music reproduction, vaulted ceilings have superior acoustics; nothing sounds worse than a box.  But if your idea of music is mp3 it probably doesn't matter.

 

Ceiling fan distributes that winter 'waste' heat.  Summer, high ceiling gives heat a place to go away from occupants, though the difference in one foot is negligible.

 

Those are the practicals.  Fashion-- what sells chicks-- I wouldn't know.

 

[kate1]

The postwar housing boom led to the necessity of using less material and creating more affordable housing, hence lower ceilings. Also, the fashionable look was more of a sprawling, low slung style rather than towering which also translates to lower ceiling height. I personally really hate low ceilings, I think they make a room feel cramped and stuffy. I absolutely love pre-war houses with their tall windows and high ceilings, they look graceful and elegant to me. As for popcorn ceilings, besides the fact that so many contain asbestos and as they deteriorate may let the fibers into the air, I’ve never seen one that wasn’t just a dust magnet. They always look dirty to me.

 

[mikael3]

Construction costs and standardized building are the main reasons for low ceilings, no doubt.  But a room with low ceiling is also easier to heat, which I suspect was an equally significant reason for moving to smaller rooms.  Who knows exactly why they settled on 8 feet, but I suppose it is just right for keeping it low but not claustrophobic; a few minutes in a room with 7-foot ceilings is all the proof you need.

 

In my neighborhood, most houses are over 100 years old and all have 10- or 11-foot ceilings. After WW2, though, many of them were equipped with commercial-style, grid-patterned dropped ceilings, suspended from the ceiling by wires and inset with foamy squares.  Hideous, all of it, utterly hideous.  But the newly lowered ceilings were supposedly easier to heat, back in the days before good insulation and good furnaces.   There aren’t any of those drop ceilings left in our neighborhood, as far as I know; new owners have stripped them all out.

 

Our own ceilings are 11-foot and we love it.  The rooms are easy to heat and cool, but of course, that’s because we have modern systems and modern insulation below the floor and in the attic.  (The walls are a different story, but we do plan to tackle them eventually.)

 

[cornutt]

I think that part of the reason for lower ceilings was the advent of air conditioning, which made it unnecessary to have high ceilings in order to be (slightly) more comfortable in summer. As for the popcorn, some 1960s and early '70s houses had it done as a design choice, and there were various techniques for doing the patterns with drywall compound. (I remember an apartment that our family lived in back around 1972, that had swirly patterns in the ceiling with bits of mica embedded... at night, it was kind of like seeing stars in the ceiling.)

More recent ones, though, are done with a very lightweight filler. It deteriorates over time, and is a big contributor to household dust. Plus, it is often used to cover up substandard drywall work on the ceiling. Our current house has no popcorn ceilings, and I don't miss them a bit.

 

[mattl]

Yeah, popcorn ceilings were the answer to low skill labor putting up drywall.  I've only seen in in lower end homes, same for knock down.  Neither would be seen in an upscale home, at lest in this part of the country.  I have read horror stories about getting rid of the popcorn ceilings.

 

[daveamkrayoguy]

I wish I had a remnant of the old ceiling tiles of my parents' basement which was actually new as was the paneling and even the bar more than forty years ago when we'd just moved in...

I think low ceilings are quite cozy and mine is at a just right, so my room is just right comfy in the wintertime but where the room faces and in between rooms gets a great deal stuffy during the hot and warm times of the year...

-- Dave

 

[cornutt]

Popcorn ceilings that are the blow-on kind made with the little styrofoam pellets are actually fairly easy to remove. If you lightly spray it with water, a lot of it just falls off, and then you scrape the rest. I've done several.

I can see that a knock-down job, made with solid plaster, might be a lot harder to remove.

 

[gansky1]

Grew up with 8' textured (knock-down) ceilings, and remember seeing the advent of the popcorn or blown-on as they were called around here.  I've seen the sparkles, heavy & light textures, etc.  Removing them can be a huge pain, but so worth the effort if underlying surface is finished properly.  

 

Our home, built in 1952 has smooth finish 8' ceilings and now that I've had them, wouldn't want anything less.  When we remodeled the kitchen/dining in '07, the drywall contractor bid the job with a light textured finish coat throughout the spaces.  He wasn't thrilled with my insistence on smooth finish, and it showed in the final result which I spent a week smoothing and fixing their "expert finishing" before painting.  

 

Terry Latz built a home in FL a few years before he passed away and had 9' ceiling and taller door options added.  It made a huge difference in the spacial feel of even the smaller rooms.  I would opt for this as well, it was very open and airy feeling.