Finally putting in our ceiling

This weekend we have some friends coming over that are going to help us finish our living room / dinning room ceiling.

Chris and I started renovating our living room / dining room back in 2002 or 2003. I can’t remember which year it was now. I think it was 2003 because I’d been sick at the beginning of the year just as we completed refinishing walls and I’d completed venetian plastering 600 square feet of space. That was a hard job. Then Sars hit at the hospital and when we weren’t working we were home worrying about the epidemic that had hit Toronto.

So it’s been three years since we last did any work in the rooms. We stopped officially due to our own illnesses, my mother passing away, and my sister ending up in a coma after surgery (and time spent assisting her recover).

I’ve been staring at an unfinished ceiling for all this time. We’ve had the tin ceiling tiles and I painted them oh so many years ago but they never went up.

I’m hoping that I can tell you by the end of the weekend that all of the tin tiles are on the ceiling where they belong and that perhaps we’ll have even put the wide baseboards on in the living room dining room too.

After that we’ll only have to put some molding up where the ceiling meets the walls, and I’ll have to figure out what kind of wall we are going to put in between the dining room and the basement stairs. Yes that area is open and I can’t stand it. I always feel like I’m being sucked down the basement stairs when I walk by the opening.

There was a solid wall there in the past- one that blocked off the basement and upper stairs. Now the upper stair area is open and it makes the living room dinning room area look so much larger. The basement opening however is just plain dangerous. I’ve wanted to fix it for some time but I’ve also wanted to finish the ceiling and the rest of the room so I can decide what kind of wall to put in that area. I’m thinking of using glass blocks as that will allow light from the kitchen and dining room areas to filter into the basement through the clear wall.

I’m just worried that it might look tacky with the venetian plastered walls, decorative molding and tin ceiling.

I’ll take some pictures tomorrow and add them to this post. Perhaps my readers can see what I’m talking about. I imagine it’s hard to picture in your mind, and then you can help me decide if a solid wall or a glass block wall will look better when the living room dining room is finished.