I have been staring at my bare basement ceiling for nearly five years. I have wanted to update it for quite a while but always seem to have something better to spend the money on. Instead of going all out, I decided to do a quick update with materials that I had on hand. It needed to be easy, too!

My basement is divided into two areas. Immediately at the bottom of the stairs, there is a little landing area that is separated from the family room and play room. This area includes a little hallway that leads to the extra bedroom and all together it equals about 150 square feet. This amount of space is perfect for me to finish in a couple of hours and if I hated it, it wouldn’t be a HUGE deal to redo it or cover it with something else.

Here is what I started with. This is what you would see if you looked up just after entering my basement:

This is what you see as you come around the corner to leave the family room or play room:

I knew I wanted to just paint everything. We do have a long term goal of installing drywall on the ceiling, but there are a few things we need to do before that happens. I decided that this area would be perfectly fine staying open if I thought it looked okay when I finished.

Everything I needed was already in my pile of hoarded materials from past projects: A paintbrush, a small roller, and a half gallon of paint.

The color was going to be BM Iron Mountain. I had a LOT of this left over from painting a wall in my bedroom. It is actually the same color I used to paint the accent wall behind the mirror in the photo above. Perfect.

I didn’t take any photos of the progress because the process is so boring. I just stood on a ladder and painted EVERYTHING. About 4 hours later, I got what I wanted and I think it’s going to stay 🙂

I left the ladder out for another day or so with the paintbrush wrapped in plastic. It seemed like every other time I walked by, I saw a spot that needed a little extra, and it was easy to just pop up on top of the ladder and give it another swipe with the brush.

Check out the photo below with the lights turned off! So dramatic! 🙂