Design Dilemma - What Colour Should I Paint a Bulkhead.

Hi there, Christy here from makingitinthemountains.com and today I want to talk about three different paint color options for bulkheads. Okay friends, welcome back to my channel. Thank you so so much for joining me today. So the idea for today's video actually came from our basement renovation that we've been working on. I haven't actually shared many details about it here on YouTube but I will leave a link to a couple of blog posts that talk all about what we're doing, what we're planning, but the general idea is that our basement has been unfinished for the 50 years that this house has existed, but we have decided to finally finish the space. So after a lot of work behind the scenes with framing and electrical and plumbing and such, we finally got the drywall up and matted and taped and I spent a few days painting all of the ceiling and walls all around the space. I thought I had all of the colors figured out. I had just planned to paint the ceiling in the same colors we had upstairs which is Cloud White from Benjamin Moore and I planned to paint all of our walls in Edge Cone Gray which is what we have all throughout the rest of our house as well. Now when it came to the bulkhead that runs the entire width of our basement, I had planned to paint the entire thing out in the ceiling color thinking that would help it blend into the ceiling and not really stand out too much in the space. The ceilings down there are quite low. They're about eight feet at the highest points and then obviously lower under that bulkhead and I wanted to make the ceilings feel as tall as I could so I thought painting out that bulkhead in the ceiling color would help make those ceilings feel higher and make the bulkhead blend into the ceiling. But as I was painting the last part of our ceiling, I noticed that it had a strange little spot where it met up with the wall. So you can kind of see in this photo here how the wall beside our bathroom door meets up with our bulkhead and how that has a strange little stripe there beside the bathroom door. That one little corner made me start questioning my choice about the bulkhead color. So I decided to do a little bit of research online to see what the proper way to paint out a bulkhead was. The thing is the more that I looked online the more I realized there wasn't really a whole lot of information out there about the proper way to paint out a bulkhead. Probably the most traditional and typical way of thinking is to paint all of the horizontal surfaces in the ceiling color and all of the vertical surfaces in the wall color. I was pretty sure this isn't the way I wanted to go because I knew it would create a sort of stripe of wall color in between the two parts of the ceiling. I did find some examples online and just as I'd expected there is a big stripe of wall color in between the two ceiling colors which I really didn't like. To me it makes the bulkhead stand out the most out of all of the options. The other option I considered was of course painting the entire bulkhead out in the ceiling color which I've already talked about. This turned out to be my second favorite option. I do think it helps make it blend into the ceiling more than having that stripe of color on the vertical surfaces but I still don't think this was the best option. The third option I found online which is one I hadn't even considered is painting out the entire bulkhead the sides and the bottom in the wall color. Now I did find some examples of this online. I have shared some photos actually over on my blog so I'll leave a link in the description box below in case you want to check those out. The more photos I looked at of seeing the entire bulkhead painted the more sure I was that this is the way to go. This is the way where the bulkhead tends to blend more into the space rather than standing out and making the ceilings feel lower. So I was pretty sure after doing all that research which way I wanted to go but I did want to paint out all three options mostly to be able to share with you. So the first option I painted out was leaving the bulkhead all in my ceiling color. As you can see painting the bulkhead out in the ceiling color really does make the bulkhead stand out against the walls making the ceiling feel even lower than it already is. The next option I tried was painting the sides of the bulkhead so the vertical surfaces in the wall color and just as I'd expected this created a stripe of wall color all across my ceiling which obviously makes the bulkhead stand out even more. Now this isn't quite as obvious as some of the photos that I found online and shared over on my blog simply because my wall color is not very drastically different from my ceiling color but there is still a very distinct stripe across the ceiling there. Finally the last option I tried is painting out the sides and the bottom of my bulkhead in my wall color. As soon as I finished painting this out I knew it was the right way to go. You can see how seamlessly this blends right into the walls making it disappear from the space rather than stand out. I really think it's the best option to make the ceilings feel higher rather than making that bulkhead stand out and the ceilings feeling lower. I hope that you found this video helpful and that it maybe gives you a better picture of why painting your bulkheads out completely in your wall color is the best option to make them blend into a space. 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