When we first bought the house the basement was carpeted, both in what was sort of the Gym area and in the largest space, used as a media room. Children had spilt milk, and dogs had pissed, judging from the smell – which permeated the house.
There was a bar of sorts, in the corner where the finished bar would eventually be built.
One of the earliest decisions related to the suspended ceiling – leave it in for the finished look, or rip it out for the extra headroom? During this time we visited a number of restaurants and/or bars which had faced the same dilemma, and saw the appeal in a matte-black painted “industrial” look to the ceiling. So – out comes the suspended ceiling!
Having pulled out all the ceiling tiles, and the support grids they lay on, the question became what to do with all the materials? I’d tried to be careful both with the tiles and grids to keep them intact for reuse, and decided to offer them for free on Craigslist one a wet Sunday morning.
As has almost always been my experience listing free items on CL, I quickly had takers. The first who seemed sensible was a chap called Erv Dahl, fro Village Park IL. We arranged for him to come with a borrowed pickup and collect the tiles and grids. It turns out that Erv is a Rodney Dangerfield impersonator, and not just a casual one. He’s really an electrician, but boy his heart was really in the Rodney impersonating.
Over about 90 minutes he’d walk back and forth in the drizzle to his pickup from the back door to the basement, hauling acoustic tiles and metals supports. Each time he’d return to the door for me to load him up he’d insist on a quick “bit” from his routine and I, who had only the vaguest notion who Rodney Dangerfield was, would chuckle dutifully.
