Bulkhead ceilings and kitchen bulkheads in Sydney

Find out what is in it before you decide. Plenty of bulkheads are purely cosmetic and can come out, but a great many are hiding a range hood duct, an air conditioning run, plumbing, or the underside of a beam, and none of those move cheaply. In an apartment there is often no roof space at all, which is exactly why the bulkhead exists. Send us a photograph and tell us what is above the kitchen and we will tell you honestly whether it is a candidate for removal.

Three things usually. Leave it and have it finished flush and painted to match the ceiling, which makes it disappear. Reface it so it reads as part of the cabinetry rather than part of the ceiling. Or make a feature of it with a shadowline or an LED strip, which is the option that changes the finish level required. If your new cupboards are going to the ceiling and the old bulkhead is shallower than the new joinery, it usually needs extending rather than removing.

The framing is within reach of a confident DIYer. The two parts that catch people out are the set out and the finish. Getting the face to land exactly where it should relative to the cupboards is unforgiving, because it cannot be corrected with compound afterwards, and any bulkhead with lighting on it needs a standard of finish that is difficult to achieve by hand. If you are framing it yourself and want us to sheet and set it, that is a job we are happy to quote.

It is priced as a job rather than by the metre, because a short run over a set of cupboards and a curved coffer over a dining table are not the same work. As a guide, a straight bulkhead of roughly three metres by one metre comes in around $500 for the gyprock lining, which means sheeting and setting a bulkhead that has already been framed. What moves it from there is the length, whether it is straight or curved, the finish level the lighting calls for, whether cornice or square set is going on it, and whether the framing has to be built as well rather than just lined. Send a photograph and the dimensions and we will turn that guide into a real figure.

Both are legitimate and it is mostly about what the rest of the room does. Cornice is more forgiving, sits comfortably in a traditional kitchen, and is the cheaper of the two. Square set gives a crisp modern line and suits a flat contemporary kitchen, and it costs more because it is less tolerant of any movement in the frame and needs sheet ends fastened at closer centres. If the kitchen has square set elsewhere, matching it is worth the money.

Often not, and that is a legitimate answer. Cabinets taken to the ceiling remove the dust shelf and the visual gap, which are two of the main reasons a bulkhead exists. What you cannot avoid is anything the bulkhead was concealing: if the range hood duct or an air conditioning run passes above that line, something has to box it in, and that is normally a shallower bulkhead rather than none at all.

Yes, and it looks excellent when the finish has been specified for it. Tell us before the quote rather than after, because a light source raking across a face shows every joint that ordinary lighting hides. That means a Level 5 finish on the faces the light touches, which is more work than a standard finish and needs to be in the price. It is the difference between a detail that looks intentional and one that looks like a bad plastering job.

Because the two are separate structures that move at slightly different rates, and if that junction was jointed rigidly there was nowhere for the movement to go. It is one of the most common hairline cracks in Sydney homes and it is not a sign of anything structural. Repairing it properly means opening the junction and detailing it as a control joint rather than filling it again, which is why the same crack tends to come back on houses where it has just been painted over.