You've bought some land in the mountains with an old house that you'd like to live in before you build your dream house, if the rooms weren't so tiny and dark and the ceilings so low. Can the ceilings be made higher, the rooms bigger? In this case, yes, and yes. Partition walls can be taken out, like the one that used to divide this room in two. Bead board covering the ceilings and walls can be salvaged. Funky as it looks, this bead board was milled locally from clear yellow pine. The old mountains folks didn't have money, but they had plenty of good lumber.

The salvaged bead board was later used as a wall covering and the rough cut yellow pine & hemlock ceiling joists were also reused to frame the new ceiling which went from 7 feet to 10 feet at the highest point.

The new ceilings, with new windows, transformed a dark, cramped little house into a light and spacious feeling little house.

The customer chose to use the salvaged bead board without refinishing it.

And the sanded floors were left unstained...

...including salvaged poplar boards that now serve as a plank floor in one room.