Our 1965 ranch is a mixture of ceiling heights; one room is vaulted with beams, but most are just shy of 8'. However, the kitchen and one hallway are 6' 11". Not even 7'!

The low hallway will remain (ductwork issues) but we're working on ideas to raise the kitchen ceiling to almost 8'. We will have to relocate some ductwork to do so. The main reason our kitchen is so low is one of those honking big fluorescent light bays with translucent plastic panels (about 4' wide by 10' long.) We probably won't know what our options are with the soffits above the cabinets until we have a contractor in to start cutting holes in the sheetrock (or until I get tired of waiting, and start waving a hammer around myself.)

There are about six houses around us with similar low kitchen ceilings, so I understand it was popular at one time, but I'd sure like to raise it. A 7' 11.5" kitchen ceiling is my hope, but we'll have to see what is truly possible.

I had a kitchen in a lofted area of a room with 14 foot ceilings so the kitchen was about 6'7''. It had upper cabinets that were 24" in height 18" over the counter. This is the whole thing with the fridge off to the left. It was a bit claustrophic, and rather hot being at the top of a 14' ceiling.

Wow, 6'7" is even lower than ours! Now I have to eat my words, I told DH nobody was going to beat our 6'11" ceiling. I'll bet it was hot up there, at the top of a tall room.

At least our room is large, so it feels more dated than claustrophobic. Sometimes friends say "cozy" but I'm not buying it.

Our upper cabs are 30", and not quite 16" over the counter (abandon all hopes of under cabinet lighting...)

Our kitchen is part of a 1902 farmhouse. I believe it is 7'5" or so. We gutted our kitchen as well as the bedrooms above it. In fact, at one point our kitchen was two stories tall during demo. DH wanted to leave it that way.

I declined for two reasons. One reason was logistical. We were already adding almost 2,000 sq feet to the house. If I had stolen the area over the kitchen, that was like another 450 sq ft. we would have to find room for elsewhere, and since we were trying to keep the character of the house and the near-moat of stone patios that encircled it, that would be hard to do.

The second reason was aesthetic. I know it is common to think that the higher the ceiling the better, but it depends on your house. We were attracted to the cozy, quirky, intimate, country nature of the home. We had just left a more formal home with 10' ceilings; it made sense in that home. I also felt that the kitchen in particular, as the heart of the home, should be cozy and smaller scale (also in keeping with my utilitarian style choices). The room has a great deal of natural light. Lastly, it opens into a vaulted greatroom on one side, and into a glass enclosed DR on the other side. So you don't feel pinched in.

We had friends who were building a home and they told us, with some amusement, about how their architect insisted that a home was more interesting with varied ceiling heights. He called it "compress and release" (hence the giggles). For example, start with a low intimate entry (compress) and the open into a soaring great room (release....)

FWiW!

P.S. An interesting side benefit of low ceilings. All of our dish storage is in an L-shaped cabinetry area. The cabs sit on the countertop, and run to the ceiling. I can't tell you how much I love the ease of getting things in and out of ALL three cabinet shelves. No more footstools or trying to haul heavy and fragile things onto shelves.

mtnrdredux, that's a good point about natural light, and how the low-ceiling space opens to adjacent spaces. Ours currently has no flow to adjacent spaces and little natural light, so those problem issues are on the table too. If we find we can't get closer to 8', maybe focusing on the other problems can make a big difference.

I guess we have some "compress and release" going on in our home too, but the traffic bottlenecks makes it more like "compress, strangle, and release." :-)

Interesting input - thanks. I'm short but DH is 6'1". He's lived in the house for 10 years, so I think he is more used to it than I am. I came from an apartment with 9-foot ceilings, which actually was sort of strange in the kitchen area, the way it was set up - in the rest of the place, though, I miss the really tall windows.

We're combining two rooms that currently have this low ceiling, which I'm hoping won't make the whole large room look stunted!

I don't think anything over 7' is literally too short outside of the NBA... I am 5'9 and DH is 6'1"

We are remodeling an 40s ranch and the kitchen is a long galley with 91" tall wood plank ceiling with 6" high beams running across it. Although we raised the ceiling in other rooms, we decided not too in the kitchen and family room to preserve the look of the original plank ceiling. I was however able to put 2 big skylights in the kitchen to make the space airier. We are still in construction phase so crossingningers it all turns out well. It feels cozy not claustrophobic.

Lalitha

Has anyone found it difficult to install a wall mounted range hood, because of your low ceiling? We currently have *no* ventilation at all over our range, and I'd like to add a stainless or metal range hood with a visible "chimney" (instead of a small, undercabinet range hood). I was thinking it would increase the visual height of the room, a bit, to have a hood with strong vertical lines. But my initial checking (not thorough) was discouraging, even the simplest and most modest designs are too tall to fit under my current 6'11" ceiling, if we can't open up space over the cabinets.

Maybe I could have a sheet metal shop cut the length of the "chimney" part...? Or extend it up into the attic area? It's obvious I'm not knowledgeable about range hoods, but wondered if any of you had any problems with this.

I think you could go with the custom shroud, or get it cut to length. The line still may not be strongly vertical because it may not be taller than wide, but at least it would not be strongly horizontal like an undercabinet hood + cabinet.

Thank you Pal, that's reassuring. You're very right that the lines will never be strongly vertical, and I'm glad you understand my thinking about not wanting the horizontal effect of an undercabinet range hood. As we work through ideas, I'm trying to be aware of avoiding horizontal lines that will visually cut the short walls in half, and looking for ways to emphasize the vertical.

Mtnrdredux, your idea of having a cabinet that sits on the countertop and goes up to the ceiling is an interesting one (might be the only way I can have a cabinet over 30") and it might create a sort of visual vertical column.

drbeanie, I would think combining two rooms with short ceilings would be somewhat better than separate smaller rooms that are, um, vertically challenged. Our dwarfish ceiling really isn't as oppressive as some might think, because the kitchen itself is large, and it has an additional breakfast area on the end. I agree tall windows can be very beautiful (I try not to think about not having any.)

Thank you for starting this thread...I hope you'll post pics of your project some day.

Mud house, ours is an adobe brick house with unique post and beam structural issues...so raising the ceiling was just not possible. However there are a lot of 18"height hoods available that vent to the top or the wall. We needed to fit the hood between 2 beams in the ceiling and it looks like we will need to do a custom liner or hood. Can you get he blower mounted on the roof. That is what we did.. So the ventilation inside the kitchen is basically just a hood liner with lights and baffles

Lalitha, even if we can raise our ceiling a little, I think we're going to at least add a solatube skylight (would much rather have the two big skylights you added, though.)

Our wide galley kitchen is in an adobe brick house too, but not traditional solid adobe walls; it's a 6" thick veneer of adobe quemado, or burnt adobe, over a traditionally framed house, with a low pitched shingle roof and drywall interior. (Are your walls adobe brick throughout, between posts?) We have been told our (burnt adobe/frame hybrid?) is rather an oddity here in southern NM, but that many were built in AZ in the 60's. The deterioriating burnt adobe was difficult to restore but we crossed that hurdle a few years ago, and I'm hoping the more conventional interior framing will not give us too many adventures (seems like it should be less challenging than your interesting structure?) but who knows.

I would definately have kept your original plank ceiling too; most of our ceilings are the correctly despised painted popcorn sheetrock.

Thank you for the input on putting the blower on the roof, I didn't even know that was possible. The very low pitch makes the kitchen attic tight and bad to get to, so we probably won't know much until we start cutting holes in drywall.

I'm encouraged by your comments, thank you. Looking forward to hearing how yours goes!

Mud house.. Another adobe home owner on GW. Wow! I understand your issues. We have adobe bricks between the posts but several of the interior walls are regular drywall. So one side of my galley is adobe and the other is a framed drywall. The original kitchen did have sola tubes. We looked at adding 1 more and I even looked at nicer finishes for the trim etc. But our contractor told us that as we have an attic above, we can do a biggish fixed skylight and frame the opening bigger to get a feeling of height. Turned out to be a good call as we ended up with two 4X4 skylights wells. This feels much better. Than the solitude which provided light but not the sense of elevation. One of these is above my cooktop and I like the sense of height there. If you have an attic at all, I would suggest exploring a skylight as opposed to a sola tube.

Lalitha

That's a really good point about the large skylight wells adding a sense of elevation, and it's a valuable observation because you've already has the Solatube experience. Big wells would completely change the feel of our space. We should possibly weigh the cost of that against the cost of raising the ceiling closer to the cabinets. DH has commented that large skylights would increase cooling costs during our hot summers, but I'm so tired of our dark kitchen (big roof overhangs and deep patios all around the house) I'm having a hard time worrying about that a lot.

I'm trying to develop workable floor plans of our current space, and possible changes, before we start talking to contractors. I also hope for ideas from the good folks here. In addition to the low ceiling, there are one or two walls that (IMO) should be altered, so our reno budget will be tight.

I posted this pic recently elsewhere, but it shows the state of our exposed burnt adobe brick patio walls when we bought the house. Adobe is a beautiful material, but it's a bit too rustic for me when you can stick your arm through the wall. One person told me that we should not have repaired the patio walls (oooh rustic charm,) but I'd rather my house not return to the earth while I'm still trying to live in it. ;-)

{{gwi:306054}}

Drbeanie, my apologies for temporarily swerving away from low ceilings as the main topic. I'm finding this thread very helpful.

Financially speaking, the skylights were way cheaper than raising the ceiling. I still recommend that. Another thing we did was to have lowered counters.. we did this initially as we are vertically challenged family and wanted lower counters.. as a side benefit, the uppers could now have more vertical height even after accomodating the 18" backsplash. So the visually impact which is driven by uppers is a taller ceilings.

In our case (we live in expensive Nor Cal), skylights was cheaper by a couple thousand.. primarily because the beams in the kitchen extended to the patio and were structural..raising the ceiling meant a whole bunch of structural work. However we did raise the ceiling in the bedrooms to 9 ft with a vault on the side near the exterior wall to work with the existing ceiling joists and framing.