I hate drop ceilings, and I have a lot of them.
It’s hard to make myself care about an architectural feature I despise.
Every ceiling of every room in four three-bedroom apartments in the student ghetto has the old 2-foot by 4-foot steel grid suspended ceilings with the cardboard acoustical panels, the kind that make your whole house look like a basement rec room in Levittown. And sorry, folks from Levittown, I’m sure you remodeled your rec rooms years ago and got rid of the stuff.
I can’t get rid of it, not easily anyway, because the contractor who rewired these apartments right before I bought them in the mid-1980s ran the wiring haphazardly along and through the original plaster ceiling and then covered the whole mess with the drop ceilings. Not only that, but the top end of the classy fake-wood paneling which also graces every room in every apartment extends into the grid frame but doesn’t reach the original ceiling.
Changing the ceilings would be a job I’m not up to. Caring enough to maintain them seems like a good idea.
Over the years the white metal tracks acquired a golden patina of nicotine, cooking grease and fly specks along with pieces of Scotch, duct, masking and electrical tape used to hold up graduation banners, birthday balloons and such. Some are bent from supporting heavier stuff, many have come unhung from the hooks that are supposed to suspend them.
The tiles, all originally white, range from bone to beige to the same orange-shellac color as the grids, and there are so many variations in their texture and perforations that any room could be a ceiling panel museum. The low, checkerboard pattern of the filthy grids and multihued panels clashes nightmarishly with the equally mismatched wood-patterned walls, linoleum-square floors and miserly small windows.
I’m awfully mean to a place that has quietly supported me for the past 30 years. Because the truth is, these four apartments have been pumping money into my life with relatively little hassle since I moved to this town. That’s relatively little hassle. Sometimes they’re a huge hassle. But in general they’re easy to repair even when destroyed, which is not uncommon, and overall the net return has been decent — not enough to live on, but a good second income. I often said it’s like having a husband with a steady, low-paying job.
One of the four apartments was so dirty and busted up after the last tenants that I couldn’t show it. That means no rent, but I have a little more time to work on it. So I have some plans, which include installing a dishwasher and new base cabinets in the kitchen and giving it a thorough cleaning which includes the filthy ceiling. To that end I spent about 12 hours over the past two days spraying the tracks with Greased Lightning, wiping off the filth, getting off the tape residue with Goo Gone and steel wool and then painting them with white Rustoleum using a 2-inch-wide sponge roller on a stick. Gave my knees a break but oy, my neck.
To my dismay I discovered by accident that I probably could have just painted over the filth and saved a lot of time. Guess I’ll do that when I get to the tracks upstairs — because, even after 12 hours, I only completed the first floor. And I still have to paint or replace all the ceiling panels. And it’s just one of four places in this condition.
Old Lady Landlord 