Balls on the Walls – Accommodating Crooked Ceiliing

No house ever has perfectly level ceilings and floors, nor perfectly plumb walls. Toss in Houston’s gumbo soil, floods / droughts, and shifting foundations, and you end up with a lot of crooked walls and ceilings. Not a big deal – until you try to hang a rhythmic wallpaper pattern.

I would have wanted to put a whole sphere at the top of the wall. But I knew that the crooked ceiling line meant that the balls would start getting chopped off as they marched across the wall, and would lose their tops. So I placed half-balls at the top of the wall.

I drew a horizontal line across the wall, at the point where I wanted the bottom of the top row of spheres to sit. You can see this in the right of the top photo. The tops of the spheres moved up and down the ceiling line, but the bottoms sat smack across this line, all the way across the wall.

The half-balls change size as they cross the wall, but your eye notices that much less than they would a fractioned ball.

Tags: crooked walls, houston, wallpaper