The veranda, in these houses like ours, used to be an actual break between the living quarters and the cooking and toilet areas. Most of these have been closed in over the years with varying designs. Next door has an office-style drop ceiling. Ours was a flat ceiling plastered in and low enough for me to reach up and place my hand flat on it. This might have been acceptable but for the ceiling passing halfway through the stained glass window at our veranda door (see above for how it looks after the change).
The plan was to make an arch (above) in the original veranda but some time in the late 40s to early 70s someone put a roof in the southern half of the room that I couldn’t see when reconning this bit. Even then, I would have removed this except that it is supporting the new, higher roof. The dream of a vaulted arched ceiling would have to be abandoned. We plowed on.
We started by taking down the poorly built and uneven arches between the dining room and veranda, leaving a pair of much brighter square passages.
The old roof beneath the newer one was not adequately insulated, so we took the opportunity to fill it with fibreglas.
The northern half of the room was fairly unrestricted with respect to height so we sloped the new ceiling up to a point that would clear the window:
And, to buy back some space in the low ceiling we installed some flush mount lights (brighter) and put in dimmer switches for both halves of the room.
The ceiling is fitted, most of the walls are tidied up; but, there is still a lot of plastering and painting to do along with a bit of minor electrical work. Slowly coming to order, but the last minute changes threw a spanner into the timings. Hopefully, all done by the end of June.
Endless British Pub Crawl (Part 3) 