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How to Build a Ceiling Dome |
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Introduction 
My wife and I were expecting our first child but between her travel schedule
and my work schedule, we always seemed to be behind on baby perparations.
One of the items that never seemed to make it to the top of our list was
what we were going to do for a baby room. We live in a small three bedroom
house and while I work from home, necessitating a home office, we still had
one bedroom to spare so I wasn't too concerned. Then one day it finally
happened. My wife called from a business trip in Atlanta to tell me she
had had an epiphany that morning... we should move the office to the spare
room and make our current office the baby room. This suited me fine as the
spare room was a bit larger and had a better view. What I wasn't ready for
was the rest of the epiphany... "and we can put a ceiling dome into the
baby room so we can hang a little chandelier".
Now I've done my fair share of home improvement projects (Building a home power monitoring system, Building a tradeshow booth on a budget), but a ceiling dome? I figured I'd just go along with things as by the time she got back from Atlanta this phase would have passed and we'd move on to other things. Well, it didn't pass so I figured I better start looking into domes. For those of you who have admired ceiling domes but never looked into installing one, I can tell you it's not for the faint of heart. There are a number of manufacturers who make domes and sell them online but it's virtually impossible to see one in real life because no one carries them in stock. In addition to long delivery times, prices for domes vary drastically (from several hundred dollars to over $600 for virtually the same dome). In addition, most domes are fairly shallow so they can be mounted between the existing ceiling joists. This results in somewhat odd looking domes as the diameter gets larger. This got me to thinking... how hard can it be to build a dome from scratch? Surely someone must have done this and published some instructions on the internet. I spent several evenings searching for something only to come up empty. Still convinced that building a dome from scratch couldn't be that hard, I waited for my wife to take another business trip figuring I could get a bit of a start and if things didn't work, I could hide the evidence. What you see below is the results of my attempt to build a dome using nothing but materials available from Home Depot. NEXT > | ||||
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