Warehouse to Home: 2nd Floor Ceiling

When we moved in the 2nd floor ceiling was a mess. There was thin set on the entire ceiling, some of which was flaking off in sections, and it looked as though the previous owners had planned on tiling the ceiling like they had done in the kitchen area. There was no way we were going to finish what they started so our first thought was to scrape off the thin set and see if we could patch it up, smooth it out and give it a more finished look. It turned out that despite our best efforts there were some large areas which refused to come off without damaging the drywall so we gave up on the idea and went back to the drawing board.

Scraping... Not Fun

Ceiling Post Scraping. Yikes

It took almost a year, but eventually we came up with the idea to use tin ceiling tiles. Our thought was a tin ceiling would cover up the ugly mess of a ceiling and fit right in with the rest of the funky tile we have in the space. After scouring the internet and local salvage shops we were able to score a lot of tile from Craigslist and also removed some tiles from a local business that was undergoing some demolition. (Thank you to Michael's Decorators for letting us take them!)

Once we had enough tile we had a lot of work to do before we could put them up because just about all of them were rusted in areas and had a lot of peeling paint.

The ceiling tiles were painted an awful bright
white color and were all peeling and flaking

One of the more decorative tiles from
Michael's Decorators

We employed an arsenal of paint stripping tools to get rid of all the peeling paint

After experimenting with a number of techniques to remove the old paint we conceded we were never going to be able to git rid of it all and compromised by only removing the areas of paint which were contaminated and flaking off. After removing as much paint as we could our plan was to paint them a copper color and sponge on some green paint over top of it to give the tiles an aged copper patina look.

In addition to the tin, we were also trying to come up with a lighting solution that would replace the bare light sockets we have now and look great with our vision for the ceiling. We really liked the look of Schoolhouse style pendants but they can be very expensive. We didn't let that deter us though and after some research we found some DIY blogs for how to fashion your own out of a cheap shade, some electrical conduit, a lamp base, pendant light kit, and spray paint.