Our faux wood beam in our vaulted living room ceiling!

Our faux wood beam in our vaulted living room ceiling!

• 6.13.2017

The faux beam was literally the first project we committed to at our fixer upper (it arrived to our old house ON moving day and we put it directly into the rented truck) but it's taken us this long to get the living room around it pretty enough to share!

One of the things we like about our slightly boring, bare bones 90's builder-grade home is the hugely high vaulted ceiling in the living room. It's the first thing you see when you walk in the front door, and it was not much to look at when we started!

Even once we got all the stuff cleaned out, and added our furniture... the room was just begging for some visual interest higher up. I was not about to paint that whole high wall as an accent wall, and I'm going pretty minimal on art in this home... so the beam was perfect!

We accented the vault in the ceiling with a faux wood beam from AZ Faux Beams. It's a high density foam that's been carved and stained to look like wood, and comes in all different styles, like rustic barn wood or ski lodge splintery, and lots of colors, or you can get them unstained and stain to match other elements in the room.

We chose the Woodcrafted beam in Dark Walnut, a nice medium tone, so I wouldn't have to worry about matching or almost-matching the dark floors we planned.

Since it's foam, it's really lightweight and we were able to install it ourselves. 

You mount it to 2x4s on the ceiling and screw it in the sides, then cover the screw holes with wood filler. So simple!

Doubtful anyone could see the screw holes, anyway, that high up... but still, we did cover them.

The ceiling is SO high that it's a little hard to capture the beam in photos, but it makes a huge impression walking into the room and feeling anchored, like your eye has somewhere to stop if you looked up. It really accentuates the coolest feature of the room, the high ceiling!

I've seen lots of cool uses for these faux beams (cover awkward electrical or plumbing?! Define a large space? Create a grid in a plain space?)--see a gallery from AZ Faux Beams here--and they work for a huge variety of decor styles! We are SO  happy with ours!!

Thanks to AZ Faux Beams for providing this beam for our review!

Shop other items from our living room here!