I've got an old house that I want to sell. The whole house is pretty great except for an eyesore of a ugly drop-down ceiling in the dining room. It was put there long ago to cover up pipes when they created an upstairs bathroom.

I want to get the most I can from the home sale and I think I remember an old appraiser saying that the ceiling drops an immediate 8k at least off the sell price.

So my main question is any suggestion on how i can improve this ceiling to make it appraise better?

I'm open to mildly expensive fancy tiles if people can attest that it won't hurt appraisal. I don't always feel like the edges of these fancy tiles (near the wall) look great but maybe.

I'm also am open to creating a drywall ceiling (below the pipes) with wooden joists that would be suspended from the joists of the real ceiling (which is above the pipes). This drywall ceiling would then cover up the pipes and look normal. It is a very large dining room so the new drywall ceiling joists will be longer than stock lumber pieces and will likely need to be tied into the real ceilings rafter's for support along the way.

Any idea what a drywall ceiling like this would be called so i can look into it more on youtube and elsewhere?

Also, any advice or recommendations?

Thanks

Edit: Here are some pictures. The drop-ceiling is still on so it wont show you rafters or piping or ventillation, etc. There are 2 chases on the walls.

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Got any pictures? We're flying in fog here. http://www.doityourself.com/forum/el...your-post.html

 

Ok i attached some pics to my original post. Thanks for advice again chandler. You rock.

Not sure how useful it will be though because the drop down is not disassembled yet so you wont see pipes, joists, ventilation, etc.

 

You're right, not very useful since we all know what a drop ceiling looks like. Any chance of you removing some of the tiles in the affected area and posting pictures of that? It will depend on the direction of the run and the total area affected as to what our answers may be. We'll mull it over and hope to come up with a good one.

 

Ya I'll get back to you with more useful pics. It might take some time though.

One thing is that the original plaster ceiling is still mostly in place as well. They just made holes where they needed to. So I'm not even sure which way the joists run yet I'll try to figure that out too. So the joists won't be exposed either way.

 

My thoughts, once I see it, would be to build a chase or a soffit of dimension lumber and cover it with sheetrock, finishing it and painting. We'll see once you get the pictures.

 

Due to time constraints I decided to just put up a fancy Ceilume drop down ceiling.