Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Beadboard

More interior wood features.



Beadboard. You still see original beadboard on the cielings of old porches. I think around the turn of the century(1900) they used it if they didn't want to plaster. Old beadboard was 3/4 of an inch thick and several inches wide. The peices fit together with a tongue and groove. The "bead" helps to hide the joint between peices.



All of the walls and ceiling of the kitchen in one of our homes had beadboard under sheetrock. I have recently seen a renovated home from the early 1900's that still has beadboard on every ceiling and wall in the house.



Sometimes beadboard was used on the lower portion of the wall with a cap moulding as wainscoating. You can buy paneling to mimic this look, but its somehow not quite the same.



You can still get beadboard that looks just like the old stuff. You'll find the clear pine which they used on everything seemingly without a thought in the old days to be prohibitively expensive though. We used some of the less than perfect grade for the ceiling of the porch on our new home and it looks pretty good.



Sometimes people call beadboard "car siding", but that is something different. Car siding is about the same dimension as beadboard and it is toung and groove but it has just two bevels instead of "beads".



I think of it as being on slightly newer homes(1940s) and more likely to be used as exterior siding. I picture an old garage in South Minneapolis when I think of car siding. Some of the newer no maintenance siding is made to look like car siding.



It seems logical to note here that fewer homes were built between the late 1920s and early 1940's. Quite often you'll find houses of that era built of different materials, like fiber board on the walls instead of plaster.



J.T.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank-you.you helped me very much. i have just started to tear the plaster off the stairway.my husband think's new panneling would look better,but i want to restore this 105 yr.house as close to original as i can.

John Tittle said...

Restoring an old home is very much worthwhile. Over the years each new owner makes a contribution to the feeling of a house. Quite often these small changes ad up to give the house a disjointed feel. If you pay attention to what was original and responsibly combine it with what works today you can pull everything together and produce something that you and others can appreciate for a long time.