Hogwarts Great Hall Storm Cloud Ceiling

The Harry Potter bedroom transformation continues, and I thought a storm cloud ceiling would look pretty awesome. So this Instructable will lay out how we took a regular white ceiling and made it look like the cloud-filled ceiling of the Great Hall in Hogwarts Castle! We used LED lights underneath a layer of Poly-Fil for the clouded sky effect! Complete with lightning effects and floating candles controlled by a wand!

What you'll need...

• Stapler
• Tape measurer
• Scissors
• Ladder
• Poster board
• Eyelets
• Floating candles
• LED light strips
• Poly-fil
• Spray adhesive
• Disposable gloves

If you want a new light fixture, do it now. This may not be needed, but we had a ceiling fan from the 80's, and I wanted an old-looking chandelier that could look like something out of Hogwarts castle. See the full video on how I painted this up to look like aged brass. 

Don't use bulbs that get hot! If you have canned lights that use bulbs that get hot, I would not do this. I have done no testing on the poly-fil to know how well it tolerates heat. But I tested the LED's I used and know they can be on pretty much all day and produce zero heat. Dimmable LED's for the chandelier are expensive, but you don’t want this Poly-Fil to have the glue fail and fall on something hot. 

I used a stapler that I got from Ace Hardware and 3/8" staples. The posterboard is thin stuff I got from Hobby Lobby for $0.29 per sheet. I used 44 sheets, and my room is approximately 13' x 13' (although, there is a slope on one end of the ceiling due to the slop of our roof, so my square footage would have been slightly larger. I bought 44 sheets and used nearly every inch of it. You'll have to do your own math to figure out the amount of paper needed.

Plan on being no a ladder a lot. So wear comfortable shoes, and brace yourself for sore shoulders the next morning. And have good music and podcasts ready! 

I got an LED set off Amazon for around $20, but prices on these things change frequently. The strip I got came with one control box that attaches to two separate strips that are 30' each. It came with a remote that has many settings for color changing, dimming, and other features. It also has an app that works with the lights to allow for other action scenes, as well as a noise sensor so the lights can interact with audio (like thunder!).

The lights are peel and stick, so you just peel off the backer and apply them to the ceiling in whatever pattern you like. I wanted a lightning type of look, so I just did two zig zag patterns across the room in two different directions.

The floating candle set that I bought off Amazon came with 12 candles, as well as a roll of fishing line to hang them. Simply cut to your desired length and tie knots through the eyelets and around the candles.

The floating candle set comes with a magic wand, and it has a button to turn the lights on and off. The candles can also be turned off by twisting the bottom a half turn. Each candle takes 2 AA batteries, and they're not included, so prepare to budget for a lot of batteries!

We bought a huge 20 lb. box of Poly-Fil from Amazon. I thought this was overkill, but for our size room we used approximately 3/4 of the box.

I used 3M spray adhesive to stick up the poly-fil. I started by just going over the light strips, mainly because I wanted to see what this was going to look like, but you don’t have to do it this way. Just spray about a 2' x 2' section and give the glue a minute to get tacky before you start putting up the Poly-Fil. Then repeat that over and over and over and over…

You're finally done! This looks great in the daytime, but absolutely unreal at night!

I have heard several comments from folks that this is a fire hazard, but these lights do not get hot at all. I tested mine for over 8 hours before putting them up, and I would recommend you do the same. Also, I heard from one commentor that the little box the lights plug into can get warm. I also tested mine for over 8 hours and it did not get warm, but definitely check yours!