Vaulted Ceilings for Dummies

vaulted kitchen ceiling

One question that regularly comes up the meetings where staffers present their "how-to" candidates for the DotD is something along the line of, "Did this person ever wonder why someone googled that question in the first place?" Sometimes it's pretty obvious that the freelancer in question never bothered to think the problem through, either because of ignorance or because of  avarice (probably both). It's hard to tell which is the case in the F. R. R. Mallory eHow.com post, "How to Hang a Pot Rack from a Vaulted Ceiling" – but we rather suspect greed. We'd like to think nobody could be that ignorant, especially someone who claims to have "worked as an architect."

That is, in fact, one of the claims in Mallory's eHow.com bio, although how someone would get such a job with BA degrees in English and psychology is a mystery. Whatever the case, it's pretty obvious that FRR never bothered to think the question through... or perhaps she didn't know what "vaulted" means.

For the record, there's a picture of one sort of vaulted ceiling above. As you might notice, the shape of the ceiling is very likely what made someone google the question. Whoever the OQ was, Mallory's answer was not going to work. The problem (at least as we see it) is how to transfer the four corners of a rectangular pot rack to a slanted surface. FRR's suggestion?

"Measure the size of the pot rack at its mounting point locations. Cut out a piece of cardboard to this size with the mounting point locations clearly marked... Place a tall ladder under the area where you want to mount the pot rack. Position the cardboard flat against the ceiling and mark the mounting position locations in pencil."

Uhhh, sorry, dumbass, but that won't work for a vaulted, i.e., sloping, ceiling. A little thought is all that's necessary to suggest that the mounting points must be farther along the direction of ceiling slope. If the ceiling lies at a 45° angle to horizontal, they'll be almost 1½ times as far apart than would be the case of a flat ceiling.

You need to use simple trigonometry to determine how far apart the points will be on a sloping ceiling. Measure the angle between the ceiling and a horizontal plane and divide the distance between points on a flat surface by the cosine of the angle. For example, if the ceiling slopes at an angle of 36° and the distance between the points would be 40 inches on a flat ceiling, divide 40 by 0.81 for a span of about 49³⁄₈ inches.

Mallory pounded out more than 300 words of how to hang a pot rack, including all manner of "instructions" for finding joists and attaching chains to "screw eyes." Yet not once did she use any of the words "angle," "slope," or "slant." It seems quite obvious that she failed to realize that the slope of a vaulted ceiling is precisely why the OQ googled the question in the first place.

Our Dumbass of the Day not only failed to answer the question, her sole "reference" contained little more than the sentence, "Pot rack distributors provide their customers with easy-to-read directions that include both technical and safety instructions." 

And people wonder why we call our nominees "dumbasses." Feh.

NOTE to eHow's vaunted "content editors": in the sentence, "You will need to mount the support hooks into ceiling joists so that the weight of the items on the rack do not pull [sic] the hooks out of the ceiling," the subject of the second clause is not "items," it is "weight." In other words, you screwed the pooch on subject-verb agreement.

MM - TRIGOMETRY