Hi Everyone. I am finishing up the LQ of an early 80's GN trailer. I have now reached the ever dreaded ceiling and am at a loss as to what to use. The ceiling is the kind that "contours" to the curve of the rounded roof. I want something that will be plyable enough to round in the corners and go flat in the center..But want it to look decent. The previous owner of the trailer used wide strips of aluminum flashing and it looks terrible. I want to go on the low cost side of things. The ceiling will need to be 18 1/2 feet from the back wall to the cabinet in the neck. The trailer is 6'8" wide on the floor and will be almost exactly 8' of ceiling material needed after following the contour.

I have looked at soffet material, but to achieve 18 1/2 feet of ceiling, it will cost approx. $200 with a lot of wasted material.

I have also looked at the standard plastic ceiling material like what it is in other LQ's and mobile homes, just not sure if this will be able to bend into the rounds of the roof, and at $25 a sheet, it is cheaper, but if it breaks, I'm SOL.

Advice and ideas please!!

thanks!!

If I understand correctly, I think you have a ceiling in place in this older trailer, but want to change the appearance of it. Is that correct? Or are you needing to start from scratch with the ceiling?

To me the curved ceiling is the most difficult and challenging part of the do-it yourself process. And I'm certainly no expert on the topic - we did alot of reading and studing things before putting in our own weekend package in a raw bones aluminum trailer.

What we did is put in our insultation in both walls and ceiling, and then covered everything with one-side good plywood. I didn't like the options in paneling, which is why we went this route. I then primed the plywood with wallpaper primer, crack filled where necessary, and applied wallpaper. I used regular wallpaper for the walls, and applied it with vinyl paste, something similar to wallpaper paste, but even stronger. The wallpaper did come with its own regular glue, so in a normal situation you could just wet the paper and apply, but i didn't trust it on the plywood, especially in something like a trailer that will move and flex a bit. For the ceiling we used the heavy duty textured wallpaper in a plain white, and applied it with the vinyl adhesive as well.

Putting up the wallpaper was a bit messy, but it didn't take long. The ceiling was the hardest, as you can imagine, but you can get lots of tips on the process if you google "hanging wallpaper with paste". It looks really, really good and the costs were reasonable. The white textured ceiling looks exactly like a normal ceiling, almost stucco like. We've only used the trailer half a dozen times since we applied it, but everything seems in great shape except for one spot, where I ran out of the regular vinyl adhesive and instead tried to use something that I thought was similar - linolemun and carpet vinyl paste. That stuff did not work nearly as well, it remained rubbery and tacky instead of sticking solidly like the other product.

The other option I considered was painting the ceiling with a textured paint. If you go to some big box stores such as Home Depot, you can see the options. You have some choices on how textured you want the paint, and you can pick the colours. I think the texture would help hide cracks and imperfections much better than regular paint.

Your other option is to put a dropped ceiling over the existing one. If you apply a dropped ceiling you will then have a square roof instead of the curved one. This will loose you some sitting height in the nose, but it will also make it much easier to apply products such as paneling up there. If you haven't seen the Todd redwrench site, go there and have a look at his ideas. There is also a DVD on "Do-it-yourself horse trailers" that might be helpful. i found the links on toddredwrench gave me ideas as well.

Good luck. The ceiling is a royal pain and planning it was worrysome to me. But now that its finished I'm happy with the job. Hopefully you will say the same in the future.

We insulated and lined the horse area of our trailer this past weekend and will continue with the same material in the dressing room once the ac support is put in.

We ended up using 1/8" PolyMax 4'x96" sheets with 1" Polyshield insulation.  Total cost to insulate the DR and horse area, put in two vents and caulk the whole trailer roof seams will be about $850 when it's all said and done.  The PolyMax was the most expensive part, especially the shipping.

Pics can be seen on http://www.woodsmithfarm.com/Photos/Stuff/Horse-Trailer-Upgrades/

Some thoughts on the material and process:

The Polyshield was really easy to put up and tape and it fit nicely inbetween the supports...did have to measure each time on both sides.

The PolyMax 1/8" is really easy to work with and light enough that 2 of us could put it up without too much hassle.  The downside is that it does sag a bit as it gets hot but I didn't feel that it looked bad once we finished the edges with the alumimum trim.  The 1/4" probably wouldn't do this but it was twice as heavy, expensive, etc.  Only time will tell if the product will hold up, but I'm pretty sure it will.  We predrilled all of the holes to allow for the expansion and contraction.

I also purchased the PolyMax H molding for the seams and that worked out really well.

http://www.farmtek.com/farm/supplies/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10052&storeId=10001&productId=287386&langId=-1&division=FarmTek&pageId=ItemDetail&isDoc=N

I fretted over the edges after it was first put up and came up with aluminum carpet trim from Lowes for $30 and it looks great now even when it's really hot out.

There are some things like cutting the H molding a bit shorter so the aluminum trim is flush against it instead of over it that I would have done differently, but this was a jump in with two feet project and see how it goes. Overall though I'm happy and now my horse won't burn her ears on the ceiling!