Creating My Basement: Painting

I managed to get the walls mudded, but I didn't do a fantastic job. It's truly an art form for those who can do it.

Next on the list was to reattach the drop ceiling. This wasn't a terribly difficult job, just extremely messy and dusty. All the pieces had to be trimmed about 3 inches to make up for the difference in the walls. I sneezed for about a week with all that stuff in my nose.

The drop ceiling, when reassembled, was an eyesore. There were parts of it that were stained, a few areas where the metal frame was rusted, and the color was just not my favorite. I wanted it to look black like a movie theater. I did some research on the Internet, and everyone recommended not trying to paint the tiles by hand, because it would literally take forever to remove the tiles and try to fill all the little holes with a brush. I borrowed my brother in law's professional paint sprayer, bought two cheap gallons of black paint at Menards ($7 each), and got set up. Turned on the sprayer, and ...... nothing. There was no suction whatsoever. I couldn't figure out what was wrong, and I just decided to pick up a cheap Wagner sprayer at Home Depot. The Wagner was messy, took a long time to refill the small 1/4 gallon container a lot, but it worked great. I was able to spray the entire theater-side in just over two hours. For anyone who's thinking about doing this, you need to hit the ceiling from every angle to plug all the holes.

Here's a look at the finished ceiling:

Next it was time to paint the walls. I originally wanted a shade of green to compliment the other side of the basement. But after the ceiling was black, all the colors I had previously liked looked REALLY dark. The dark ceiling definitely sucks up a ton of light in the basement. I had a moment of panic after consulting my wife, and I went with a color that was much lighter than the greens I picked. The moment I started painting and got two walls done, I knew it was crap. Angela also felt it was high on the crap scale.

Lots of yellow and hardly any green

I decided to go with my original color, because it couldn't be worse than what I'd picked. I was happy with the Frosted Pine color from Glidden.

Next, I made preparations to mount the TV. I got a great deal on a very basic but sturdy mount from Monoprice.com. This mount never would've been possible in the old walls with 1 inch firing.