Home improvement is one of those tasks that everyone talks about, but not everybody does anything about. A lot of the goals of home improvement center around changing the look of a specific room, trying to open it out, or to change its atmosphere to something more rustic. Faux beams presents one option for doing this.
Fake beams have several advantages over using real materials. First and foremost is the cost of acquisition - faux beams are extruded in polyurethane, rather than hand cut from raw timber. This means that they cost as little as one eighth what a real wooden member would cost.
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They're also (surprisingly) easier on the environment. A lot of the wood used for timber decorative beams is over-harvested. A faux beam is manufactured out of polyurethane which contains no atmosphere damaging chlorofluorocarbons. Even in terms of transportation to the job site, they have significant green advantages, because of their reduced weight (and thus lower transportation costs).
That reduced weight also helps homeowners put them up on the house. These beams are much lighter in their weight than a comparable natural beam would be; this means they're not suitable for any kind of load bearing, but most beams used in modern housing are for decorative purposes anyway.
When choosing where to put these beams, you need to focus on where the lighting and the ventilation in the room comes from - every ceiling is going to have obstacles that need to be amended to when planning where the beams go.
You'll also want to factor in the height of the ceiling - a 10 foot ceiling needs smaller beams than a 15 foot one, just because of the difference in parallax (the angle that someone on the floor would see them at). This can be a bit tricky to figure out, but a little basic trigonometry will see you through. (in general, anything that's 50% farther away needs to be about twice the dimensions to have the same visual impact.)
To mount faux beams, you'll put small blocks of wood into your ceiling, ideally attached to your ceiling joists. The faux beams, which are hollowed out, are mounted to those blocks and screwed in with wood screws. It's worth the extra effort to counter-sink the bolts, and you'll want to caulk them with a stain that matches the color of the beam.
These beams are weather proof and can be stained to match any natural hue. They're suitable for indoor or outdoor usage, and they're the sort of project that any self respecting do it your-selfer can do in about a weekend. Remember the usual adages - measure twice and cut once, and always work from a set of plans before you begin.