Library Ceilings

​Finally, I’m making some read headway on this basement library. Since working on the bookcase doors last summer, I had stagnated on working in here with other priorities coming up.  When we had the toilet leak, that definitely kick-started some real progress!  Mostly, I’ve been sorting what we’ve been storing down in the library since reconfiguring, and I really went hard on getting work done on the ceilings.  Most of which is now done!

There was a lot of prep work and future-proofing that we needed to do before getting this done, like running preliminary wiring to the future fireplaces.  This part of the basement is a huge step: most of the plumbing and electrical run through this ceiling, so closing it up really means finishing a huge amount of progress on this house.

I also pre-painted all of the bead board in Sherwin Williams Delft (9134).  It’s just a bit lighter than the walls (SW Riverway 6222), and helps visually lift the ceiling while still feeling like a unified color.

For the ceilings in the library, hall, and office, we decided to use bead board instead of drywall.  There are a handful of reasons, not the least of which is ease of installation: I can fairly simply complete the task alone.  The other benefit is with all the soffits and bump-outs, it’s easy to make a ton of specialized, individual cuts than plan them all out with drywall.  But the biggest benefits are how physically lightweight the bead board is and the thin profile doesn’t reduce the headroom enough to be noticeable.  In fact, with fewer interruptions and built in texture, the ceilings feel higher despite losing up to an inch in some of the walking space.

I started with the flat sections of joist cavities, filled them with Rockwool safe and sound, and nailed the pre-painted bead board directly into the joists.  There were a few tricky areas to consider with planing these: I have a few water pipes to work around, and decided instead of making soffits everywhere, a few could just be painted.

Soffits

Planning the soffits was a bit of a pain: mostly I just needed to determine where they started and ended, and I wanted to be sure anywhere that could need access had that access.  There is a jumble of plumbing under the main floor bathroom and next to the basement bathroom, so I elected to designate that as soffit space, as well as adding the area under the upstairs bathtub drain.

Both of these locations have removable soffit panels attached with magnets.  That way, if there are ever any concerns, these can be accessed without any demo.  That means all our plumbing is able to be serviced without any major tearing into walls.  Problems are traceable, repairable, and tucked away.

Of course, the main soffit through the center of the library is the big deal in this room: it runs around our cold air return and our main heat duct through the house.  Since working around the soffits for over a year, I’ve found it’s been the biggest question of how to manage get the soffits tight to the ductwork safely, and in a way that wouldn’t encourage the boisterous cat to climb into the ceiling.  I built a series of simple frames to go around the ductwork and butt up to the register.  It’s amazing how much more comfortable the space is with air circulating through there again.

One of my favorite additions to the library is the ceiling register.  It’s from the same house as the bathroom and kitchen floor registers, but we found this one tucked in the attic eaves: it had been abandoned with the little half-story was expanded in the 70s.  I’m glad its story continues here.

There was one glaring step that we just completed in this ceiling before I could really finish the back wall: an old gas pipe to a once-installed boiler hovers overhead.  It’s 20 feet long, and preparations to get rid of it actually started back when we eliminated our gas meter last summer.  My husband and I started cutting it out, but the violent shaking made us call in the family gas-man: my Father-in-Law.  He helped us with the gas leak in our crawl space, and said he’d help with this beast when the meter was removed.  Some jobs just need three adults, and with next to no mounting brackets on this pipe, this was one of them.

Now, we’re just about ready to play with furniture and actually use this space as a family room again!  I’ve been sitting in the basement chairs to work on writing this, and we’ve even let the four-year-olds do some exploring. We’re in the endgame now.