This Bullnose Bead Creates Simple, Stunning Ceiling Designs

Great drywall work doesn’t stop at the walls — for a lot of folks, it’s all about those ceilings. In fact, a ceiling detail can be the best way to take an interior space from unremarkable to unforgettable. And you can do that with nothing more than some drywall and a few corner beads. Don’t believe us? Try this Bullnose bead to create simple, stunning ceiling designs like the medallion pictured above! Read on to see how we did it.

For this ceiling detail, we used the kerfed version of our 3/8” Medium Bullnose corner bead. If you’ve never used a kerfed bead before, they’re designed specifically to terminate into another surface — usually a window or door, but you can also use them for super easy drywall details like wainscoting or medallions like this one.

To create this medallion ceiling detail, we took two sheets of half-inch drywall and cut them into the shape of our design, using adhesive caulk to stick them together. (While that caulk dried, we temporary placed a few screws into the drywall.) Full-sized 3/8” Medium Bullnose Kerfed Beads were installed on the outside corners of our outer sheet of drywall using 847 Spray Adhesive and half-inch staples. For the tray-ceiling-style inner section of the design, we trimmed nearly a half-inch off the beads’ rounded flanges so that they would terminate cleanly against the half-inch drywall, and installed them the same way.

To make our circular marks on the drywall for the design’s lighting fixtures, we used an old Trim-Tex trick (also seen in more detail here): we made our measurements and temporarily affixed a screw into the center point of each future fixture, with the screw slotted through a hole in the mud leg of a scrap piece of corner bead. By placing your pencil through another mud-leg hole at the proper distance, you’ll be able to use this scrap bead as a makeshift compass, swinging the bead around in a perfect circle to make your marks.

That’s really all there is to it — we brought our ceiling medallion design to the home we were working on, where it was simply installed like any other drywall detail. A few coats of mud and paint later, and you’ve got a stunning ceiling detail worth bragging about. And you did it all with not much more than the kerfed form of our legendary vinyl Bullnose Corner Bead and drywall!

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