The plaster on the ceiling definitely had some parts that were falling down but they were not the majority of the ceiling. When the drop ceiling was put in, I believe that the plaster would not have been too difficult to repair but the homeowners chose not to. They either were trying to modernize the house or thought it would help with fuel bills or just wanted a place to run new electrical wire without much work. Whether it helps with fuel bills is debatable from what I've been told. We believe it was the electrical wire that made them put in the drop ceiling because there is a ton of electrical wire running up there.
This was one of five rooms in our house with no overhead lights or lights that could be turned on by a switch. Very annoying to have to cross the room to a lamp for light! Now that we can see the original ceiling, it's obvious there was an overhead light in the room. It was gas. Here's what was left sticking down through the ceiling:
Doug says this is a gas line and there is one electrical wire running down next to it so the original homeowners evidently didn't object to overhead lights.
We found three kinds of wallpaper on the upper walls and ceiling. All through are basically boring brown patterns. Fortunately, we won't need to remove them to execute our current plan for the room. Here you see one type on the ceiling and another type on the top of the wall. The type that is on the ceiling is found everywhere in this house. Someone must have been having a going out of business sale on it. The bottom picture shows the kind that was on the walls before the paneling was put up. Again, a brown boring pattern. Definitely not Victorian!
The best part of the work so far, besides the vastly improved proportions of the room, is that Doug found the wire that connected to the wall switch by the door. Even though we had no light in the room, we did have a wall switch which was very annoying. We tried plugging things into outlets thinking it was one of those switches that control an outlet but it wasn't. When Doug got all the ceiling panels down, there was an electical wire laying there not connected to anything on one end. He put a cheapo light fixture that just holds a bare bulb on that wire. Eureka, we now have an overhead light fixture! It's amazing how being able to turn on a light when you walk in a room can make your day! It's obviously not the end solution but it will work until we can get one of the beautiful art deco light fixtures we want to go with our theme of a Art Deco movie theater.
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