DIY making your ceiling feel 2 feet higher

Hey all! You’ve been asking for details on our ceiling mural, so here goes! We’ll give you prices, links…what you’d need to get started yourself.

We originally lived in downtown San Francisco in the bus and wanted to bring some nature into our space. It ended up making the space feel much taller. In total it cost about $300 but took over 200 hours to paint.

Dots…and more dots…I listened to every single Harry Potter audiobook while painting

Materials:

Canvas drop cloths from Home Depot
Paint samples from Home Depot (by far the cheapest way to get lots of high quality paint)
Some Dollar Store brushes

It ended up being a cool community project, as friends who visited could add their own dot. More friends painting at Frequent Stops IG account

02%20PM

It caused me a lot of anxiety at first watching new dots go up where I wouldn’t have chosen to put them, but luckily it turns out that it’s pretty hard to make dots on the ceiling NOT look like leaves :slight_smile:

We painted it on the ground, and to get it up, we put furring strips along the steel struts on our ceiling, and then used a pneumatic stapler and t50 staples every foot or so. We had to take it down at one point, and were stoked to find that the top hadn’t molded at all.

This is something that you could very easily achieve even if you don’t have the ability to paint it yourself. All you need to do is find a tapestry with the desired image.

Would love to hear if anyone else has tried something similar.

So that’s the ceiling! Let us know what you think!

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Never thought of that!
But definitely a great idea, im sure someone will give it a go and post how theirs turned out.

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It’s beautiful! It’s ingenious!

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Love this. Is your roof/ceiling insulated or is this painted on the original ceiling?

I have a similar but smaller shuttle bus I am working on. If you documented your build, I’d love to see the details.

Found my answer on Insta… thanks.

This looks amazing! Wish I saw this before painting my ceiling :wink:

It does have some insulation but not a ton. This build is more of a summer/California style build. We are working on a second built at the moment (we did a painting in that one as well) and it has a full 2 inches of insulation.
@frequentstops is our instragram if you are interested in checking it out.
Cheers

What did you paint on your ceiling?

Good choice to listen to audiobooks when painting. Audible audiobooks are a great source. I usually get their downloads on my phone. With the help of the Audio Capture from AudFree, I can easily save the audio files on my devices and listen to them offline.