Basement Painting

We're set to close on the 15th of October, so I'm getting a little braver with my fixes and updates.  I realize I want a little experience with the new airless sprayers before I tackle painting the exterior of the house.  I also know that once I pull down the ceiling tiles in the basement, I'll want something to make it look decent while I'm working on the wiring and rearranging the upstairs.  I thought I'd do a dark paint on the exposed wood.  I'd seen pictures of that done in basements before and liked the look.  The basements in this house are about 8" tall, a little lower than that when duct work or plumbing is a factor, so while not low, it can't hurt to have a dark look to improve the height of the ceiling.

So, I figured I'd start by painting the ceiling in the unfinished part of the basement.  Here are some before pictures:

 The paint I used was the same dark flat Olive Green I'd used on the lighting plate in the bathroom.  It's got a nice earthy, modern look to it.  Prep work was simple, I took a leaf blower and blasted everything I could with it.  Man, did that kick up a lot of dust.  In fact I had to leave it alone that night and tackle the rest of the job the next day.  Used a Wagner Power Painter, one model up from the base model, cost $99.  This one has a feature that it can spray in any direction, which I figured would be important when doing a ceiling.  Paint was a combination paint/primer from Lowes.  Figured the job doesn't have to be perfect, as the dark color hides most mistakes, and it's rough wood with lots of blemishes, so it only needs to be good enough.

Here is the end result.  Much improved.  Granted, it's still a dingy basement area, but this demonstrates to me that I can do this in the rest of the basement, and with proper track lighting, it would actually be an acceptable ceiling treatment for the near future.  Leaving the ceiling unfinished allows me easy access to any work I need to do, but the modern color makes it look nice enough that it could pass for having been intended that way.

There is a little touch-up work to be done with a brush to hit a few minor areas I missed, and a few spots I couldn't reach with the sprayer.

However, I did learn a few lessons from this:

• The sprayer gets paint EVERYWHERE.  I'll need to more carefully cover everything when I do this in the finished area.  Plus I need to think more about drop cloths even when I do the exterior of the house.
• The sprayer advertised that it can be used on un-thinned latex paint, but based on the results I think I'd be better of thinning it and adjusting the sprayer for a thinner paint.
• It takes a LOT more paint to do this than I thought.  Ended up using almost 5 gallons just to do the ceiling in a 22'x15' area.
• I'm really glad I used a respirator when I did this job.  Using a sprayer indoors is very messy.