Thursday, November 1, 2012

Dropped Ceiling For The Basement Storage Room

Wanted to share a good alternative to a sheetrocked ceiling in a basement storage room


As usual, we've taken a long time between having all this work done until finally finishing the ceiling. We do things as we have the time and money and since it's in the basement, and a storage room, it really affect how we live in the house. It took us 4 years to finish the basement family room and bathroom but this area only took a few years ;) So much for timeliness.
Sorry for the rabbit  trail!

Mr. F was going to leave the walls unfinished and just put the shelving up, but since we had a BUNCH of paint samples and some partial gallons, he decided to mix it all up and finish the walls. The containers shown in this pic were used for the undercoat, which turned out to be a beige color. The beige samples were purchased in my decision to find the perfect beige for our Family Room. He used my 10 assorted Benjamin Moore grey paint samples for the topcoat. The grey samples were left over from when I was choosing what color to paint our Kitchen. lol...anyone else have a problem deciding on paint colors?

Here's the room all painted.The color is perfect...not too light and not too dark. Sooo glad to have more room on. my paint shelves in the garage. hmmmmm


Now about the ceiling...
One great thing about having an unfinished basement is being able to get to pipes and wiring for the projects upstairs. Mr. F thought about leaving the ceiling unfinished like this for easy access, but he just couldn't do it because the walls looked so great, painted and all.
So, he decided to put in a dropped ceiling. There are some pretty fancy dropped ceilings out there, but this is a storage room after all, so we opted for the cheapest ceiling tiles. Sheetrock would have been a lot cheaper than a dropped ceiling, but we needed to have access to the pipes and wiring, especially if there's ever a problem, so it was worth the added cost to have access, but we weren't going to spend more money on fancy tiles. It's a fairly easy project. 
Mr. Fanatic started by putting up the tracks around the edge of the room.
The next step is to add the tracks lengthwise in the center.

Then he added the tracks that connected the lengthwise tracks.

The tracks are suspended by wire to the ceiling joists.



Once all the tracks are up, then the ceiling tiles are put in and sit on the tracks. You just push up on the tiles to get access to the ceiling.

Mr. F installed two can(pot) lights in the ceiling, which now looks clean and finished.



This storage room looks so clean and organized now and the drop ceiling allows for easy access to the pipes and wiring above....


We need to work on the Barn Doors for the Basement and finish up the Solar Tube Skylight, which is partially installed. 

So many projects, so little time.

What do you have on your project list and how do you prioritize it?

Pam

14 comments:

  1. Your basement storage room looks absolutely wonderful! (I miss having a basement!)

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  2. Pam that is the neatest storage room I've ever seen!! You just motivated me to get ours cleaned up! It looks great! As far as projects go I have quite a few paint projects lined up, and hoping to get them all finished before Christmas!

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  3. The ceiling is fabulous and the storage room is to die for. I would love that. Can't wait to see all the changes taking place. Hugs, Marty

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  4. He is a handy one to have around, isn't he?!? Looks fabulous! Tom is going to start building shelving for the garage and mechanical room here in the next few weeks! Your room is an inspiration!

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  5. Your husband did a wonderful job! Everything looks so neat and tidy, ...and organized! That's awesome! :)

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  6. The basement looks great. I have the same paint "collection". Sounds like you made good use of yours :)

    My project list includes re-doing our home office and my daughter's bedroom for the umpteenth time!!!

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  7. That looks so awesome! As usual your hubby did a marvelous job. Dropped ceilings are the way to go in some areas of the basement. We did that in the laundry room. I'm after my hubby to build shelving units like what you guys did. I just brought it up the other day!

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  8. I'm not crazy about drop ceilings but for a basement they are perfect!!!! It really finishes off your storage room! My project list is long and we haven't been good about it lately. Now we can add giant tree removal to it after the storm. That's gonna be a biggie but we are lucky it went the way it did.

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  9. Such a great, organized storage place....I love the way you placed those trunks on a carrier with wheels!

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  10. What a fantastic space Pam! I'm not jealous of all of that storage room at all...nope...not one bit! ;-)
    Vanessa

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  11. What I would do for that room and storage Pam. Just wonderful!

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  12. Great job! We have a stack of the drop ceiling tiles and tracks just waiting to be added to our basement ceiling. Not my favorite look, but it's clean and practical - gotta have access to those pipes, etc. I'm saving this post for instructions :) Linda

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  13. Y'all can do anything!! I'm trying to convince Dean that we can get rid of the fluorescent lights in our kitchen but he's not so sure. I wish we had a basement!

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