NO! MORE! OVERHEAD! PIPES! EVER!

[solarbird]

...well, not in the hallway, anyway...

Guh, I'm tired. But here, have some lovely pictures of the new ceiling in the hallway. I've also put in all the wood putty to cover all the holes atop the countersunk nails, and a few other places as well. Tomorrow, I can sand it. I might even be able to start staining the stuff that gets stained. (That would be the 1" square boards that make up the new ceiling's support structure, and the vertical piece of trim that goes all the way up to the ceiling from the floor. The other trim gets painted.) I hate sanding, but, well, it'll be good.

All these pictures aim kind of up, because that's where I've been working today.

Here's the view from the basement doorway:


And here's what it looks like from Rebecca's living room:


The point of this shot is to show the decorative board, and how it bridges the two different levels of the ceiling. (Don't ask. It's not my fault.)


And this is what the hallway looks like from Mimi's kitchen; it also shows the other side of the decorative board, and hopefully gives you an even better idea of how the two ceilings are connected together.

Comments

[starfallz.livejournal.com]

Vurry nice. Are those lights behind the screen? If so, how will you replace them when they burn out? Or is this just some funny optical trick?

[ssha.livejournal.com]

If it works like most lightboxes, yes those are compact fluorescants back there. And the panels are not attached in any way, but rather are slightly flexible, and can be set into the frame and removed easily.

[ssha.livejournal.com]

Whoo!! It looks VERRA nice, Dar. Kudos to you!

Yep, those are lights

[solarbird]

As Cyn the TOTAL CHEATER who SAW IT and therefore was NOT guessing said, those are track lights with compact florescents installed. And the acrylic panels slide back and forth; they're just resting on the frame, rather than attached to it. (It's all just held in place by gravity. ^_^) So getting to the light track isn't a big problem.

I went for a light track instead of a wall-mounted pair of tubes because I wanted to be able to aim the light underneath the pipes that still cast shadows against the screens. (Dammit! The light is being aimed and that part is working, but I forgot that light would bounce off the real cealing and cast shadows no matter what I did. Well, unless, I dunno, I painted the ceiling black or something. But I think that would be stupid.)

Re: Yep, those are lights

[princessheacock.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I get the two levels of ceiling/decorative board thing. I don't know where to look. But the rest looks nice.

So I assume from other comments here, you didn't actually put in a new ceiling. You put in those underhang lights with panels on the bottom and just slung it low enough it covered up the pipes as well?

Have I stated lately how much I admire how much you do yourself on your place?

Re: Yep, those are lights

[solarbird]

The ceiling situation is very confusing. Here's how it got to where it is, and how it is now.

Originally, this hallway, another closet, and the bathroom were all one room. That was in 1924. In 1926 - just two years later - they realised, "Hey, you know, not having a bathroom on this floor is kind of stupid" and built one in. They also built in the hallway and a pair of closets, one facing the hallway (now part of the hallway) and one facing one of the bedrooms (still a bedroom). They did this kind of stupidly (and weakly), but I described that already.

When building the closets, they decided to lower the closet ceilings. I don't know why, particularly since, well, they were _closets_. The original ceiling is still up there above the new, lowered one. They dropped it roughly two feet, to right under eight feet above the floor. They did this by taking up a huge sheet of plywood which they then - inadequately - attached to a few random wall studs. Meanwhile, they took out a couple of wall studs for... no clear reason I can see. But they're gone. Then they painted the plywood and called it good.

When I took out the closet facing the hallway and turned it into an extension of the hallway, that meant that the larger hallway had two levels of ceiling - the one that used to be the lowered closet ceiling (at 8') and the original higher ceiling in the old hallway (at 10'ish.) The transition area - where the height changes - is where the decorative board is now, in these pictures. On the former-closet side (with the bookshelves), the ceiling is just under 8' high; on the other side, the original ceiling is around ten feet high.

But it gets more complicated.

The pipes that run along the length of the hallway do not run high enough that I could just extend the lowered closet ceiling to cover the entire hallway. They're hung too low - they'd still be visible below the ceiling - if I just made it all consistent with the former closet. And if I'm putting up a new ceiling, I'm not leaving pipes below it!

And even if the pipes weren't a problem, the elevated, tall bathroom door also goes too far up for that ceiling height, so I'd have to redo that doorframe and doorway to make them shorter. It would have been obscene amounts of work for a totally inadequate return.

But I still needed to do something about the ceiling. I tossed out a few ideas, and then eventually came up with this idea of a decorative board. It's the only specifically and intentionally Japanese design element I put in the hallway - the rest is just my heavily-Japanese-paralleling design sense! It would need to be tall enough that it could meet the lowered ceiling of the closet, but come down enough that it would be below the pipes, so that I could run a new, even lower ceiling, in the hallway.

While the doorway trim was all down, I had this thought that I might be able to have the new ceiling flat. But that was, um, blind optimism on my part, as I quickly discovered when actually doing measurements. (I could have run it flat, but it would have meant doing really stupid things to the bathroom door trim, and I decided it'd just be better to built an angled ceiling. If anybody is wondering, that's about a three-degree angle. I know it looks like more, but it's not.)

So. On the former-closet side of the decorative board, you have an improved (I added wallboard and stuff so it didn't look like evil) lowered ceiling that's a bit under 8' high. That runs up against the decorative board. (It doesn't actually attach to it - it attaches to the other, less impressive decorative board that runs parallel to the main one. You can see it in the "From Mimi's kitchen" picture.) Then there's a 2x4 spacer that I put in for structural stability purposes (more salvage lumber from other parts of the house), and then the decorative board. On the other side of the decorative board, I've attached the edge of the lightbox. It's at its lowest point along that wall, then rises slowly to attach at the other wall above the bathroom door's trim.

And that's one of the reasons why this hallway has taken so long.

Oh well! At least I learned several new woodworking skills. ^_^

Re: Yep, those are lights

[wrog]

so is raising the pipes that big a deal or is this more a case of "I'll be damned if I'm gonna call a plumber when there isn't actually water spilling out onto the floors and down the stairs..."?

(I guess having spent roughly $9K on plumbing this past month,
I should know the answer to this...)

Re: Yep, those are lights

[solarbird]

It'd be a huge deal. A huge, nasty, awful deal. For one thing, there're pipes from two heating zones, plus cold and hot water pipes, plus some low-voltage wiring we put in later since we couldn't gt rid of the pipes. And one of the heating zones is old cast iron, and both of those have extra side-feeds running off of them which are somewhat gravity dependant, so might stop working. And even if all that was okay, you couldn't really put them into the true ceiling, so you'd still be having to make a lowered, false ceiling.

So. NO. FUCKING WAY. I think it looks pretty good, it's really hard to tell that there are... um... seven pipes in a cluster up there.