Blood and Tin

The 2nd-floor dining room is almost finished. We've resurfaced the dropped ceiling, we've cleaned up the parlor stove, and we've cleaned and painted the metal tiles behind it. Now it's time for the big project: the tin ceiling.

We experimented with tin tiles about three years ago when we renovated the 1st-floor (commercial) kitchen. There, we used copper tiles as a backsplash, and they worked really well. So we decided to continue that theme upstairs by adding a tin ceiling to the dining room.

As you can see, the ceiling is currently covered with textured wallpaper, painted pink. It's mostly in good shape, but a water leak at some point in the past must have dripped through and damaged the wallpaper here. The ceiling itself is fine; there's no structural damage. But the textured wallpaper was ruined in one area and we had no way to fix or replace it. (You can see a bit of a damaged area at the far right side of this photo.)

The wallpaper continues from the ceiling down the upper part of the walls (the "frieze" area, if you're into that kind of thing) and we've left that part intact, although Kathy has painted it a lighter yellow color to cover the pink.

Since the ceiling itself is in good condition, we can mount the tin tiles directly to the plaster without having to nail up any plywood or furring strips. The tiles themselves are 24" square, which is pretty big if you think about it. They're embossed metal and finished in whatever color you want. They fit together like tongue-and-groove flooring, but square. Two sides have male flanges and the other two sides have female flanges. The tiles interlock and help support each other when they're screwed into the ceiling.

The interlocking flanges mean that you have to turn each tile the right direction, and you have to install them in a particular order, or they won't fit together. Specifically, you have to start in one corner of the room and work in a particular sequence toward the diametrically opposite corner. That sounds easy, but there are some complications.

For starters, the room isn't exactly a multiple of 24" wide or long, so some of the ceiling tiles -- about half of them, in fact -- will have to be cut down to size. Rather than start with a full tile in one corner of the room and end with the cut-off tiles on the opposite side, we decided to center all of the whole tiles in the middle of the room and distribute the partial ones around the perimeter. That way, the finished ceiling would look symmetrical instead of off-center. Kind of like we planned it.

The trouble with that strategy is that you have to install the cut tiles first, in the corner, before any of the whole tiles can go in. You also have to be careful not to cut off all the flanges that help hold the whole thing up.

After a little bit of grade-school arithmetic, we figured out how many tiles we'd have to cut, how wide/long they'd need to be, and where they'd all go. Not too difficult. Just start cutting and go. Let's do this thing!

Yeah, about that. Cutting through a two-foot-square decorative metal tile is harder than it looks. Especially when you have to keep a straight line. I measured twice, marked with a Sharpie, grabbed my tin snips, and started bleeding.

Those suckers are sharp! It's a good thing that tin tiles are completely sanitary and covered with antiseptic coating, and that the inside of the UPS van is filled with antibacterial gas when they make deliveries. Otherwise I'd be worried.

I was averaging two Band-Aids per tile, but after a while they got slippery and stopped sticking. I finally got smart and wrapped my thumb and forefinger in a whole bunch of fresh Band-Aids. They may not stick to me, but they stick to each other pretty good, and they made a nice padded mitt that slides off the raw metal edges precisely the way my hand doesn't. Who says I'm not a fast learner?

Kathy helped me snap a new chalk line on the ceiling every few hours so that everything stayed straight. The tiles themselves aren't always perfectly square, and they're meant to have a little gap between them. You're not supposed to snug them up against each other or else they might bend or creak when they get warm. So maintaining a constant spacing was important, and just eyeballing the gap wasn't going to work. Not when I'm up on a ladder with ceiling tiles in my face.

The first row went pretty well, and then it got easier. The whole, uncut tiles are definitely less work than measuring and cutting partial tiles (and peeling open Band-Aid wrappers with one hand), and it's nice to see the progress. We did about three-quarters of the room on the first day, and finished it the day after.

We're pretty happy with the result, and it definitely brightens up the room. The new ceiling tiles are also a near-match for Kathy's painted metal tiles behind the parlor stove, which was all part of the plan. There's still a bit of metal trim work to do around the edges, but it feels like 90% of the job is done.