Anyone here ever replaced their outdoor porch ceiling?

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beaded plywood and then paint it, looks good on mine

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Same on mine.

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beaded hardie sheets

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Have hardie plank on a couple areas of the house that is not brick - that product will last forever as it’s cement board.

I’d go hardie board for durability alone.

The beaded plywood looks better than the Hardie beaded. That Hardie is just a thin line. No real defined bead

I have hardie board as finish trim on my outdoor beams. I didn't float it, just painted.

I did beaded plywood on our back patio with cheap insulation sandwiched between on our back deck I build last year. Sprayed it white and called it a day. Looks great and has held up well in the weather.

Those w/ outdoor porch ceilings...did you insulate? When I redo mine, I'm debating spray foam. I read somewhere that it can drastically reduce the heat. Thoughts?

Long post incoming……..

Thanks for the compliments. Here's some of my info/thoughts on porch ceilings (we just did a lot of thinking on this while building my house). We were trying to decide on what to put on our front and side porches along with our patio. We had initially planned on beaded hardie boards then went back and forth with t&g pine, then i thought about the fence board option. We went with fence boards on our back patio (stain & sealed with benjamin moore Arborcoat) and t&g pine on the front and side porch (“painted” with BM arboarcoat light blue). One thing to think about is wood grain won’t show bugs/dirtiness as much as light color painted.

Approx price/SF of a few options:
Cedar fence boards: $1.45
Pine T&G: $2.18
Cedar T&G: $4.22
Beaded Pine Plywood: $0.75
Beaded Hardie: $1.56

My pros & cons for each:
Cedar fence boards
P: look good (if you get good quality, not lowes), we preferred how cedar looked vs stained and sealed pine, easy to install (just butted together and face nailed with a finish nail gun)
C: takes some labor to plane them, need a benchtop planer

Pine T&G
P: look good installed, very clean finished look, not too expensive, reversible so beaded look as well
C: PAIN IN THE arse to install on a ceiling because the boards are never perfectly straight and you have to wedge them in, didn’t like how they looked stained. I’ll personally never install again, LOL!

Cedar T&G
P: Looks awesome
C: Cost$$ and installation issues similar to pine

Beaded Pine Plywood (installed this on my porch at old house):
P: Least costly
C: not uniform look (plywood isn’t perfect), didn’t like stained look of pine similar to t&g, big pieces would be awkward to install

Beaded hardie (installed this on a small porch on my old shed, not a big area):
P: durable, uniform look
C: Awkward/heavy to install plus hardie is prone to breaking if it bends (once installed, it's bulletproof). Need to use large head nails to suck it up to joists or decking (more putty/caulk work)

Someone mentioned “floating” smooth hardie. You’d have to use some sort of exterior compound plus I think you’d be dealing with cracking forever. One thing I’ve seen is someone installed full sheets of smooth hardie (or maybe beaded) then used 1x3’s as battens in a 4’x4’ pattern to cover the joints. Looked good and if you cut the sheets to 4x4, it would be easier to install.

We don’t have insulation above our patio currently but could add easily in the future.

Hope the info above helps.

No and only planed one face. So they’re not all the same thickness either (within 1/16”). We would do 40 or 50 in a stack at a time and just pass them all through and out them in a “done” or “not done” stack. And kept passing all of them til they were smooth and “done”. The widths were close enough not to cause issues.

The beauty of the fences boards was that it looked a little rustic so it didn’t have to be perfect.

On the t&g pine, you have to close the gap until the v-groove touches to give it that finished look. It takes some work.





Here’s a t&g piece being installed with wedges. Had to screw each block into the ceiling then hammer the wedge in. 5-6 wedges per 16’ board. And these were straight, good lookin boards.