Not a drop ceiling
Saturday may Dad and I put up the framing for the ceiling in the back of the house. The ceiling that drops down but is not actually, a drop ceiling (or a suspended ceiling). I keep calling it the drop ceiling and confusing eveyone. Just look at the picture and you'll understand.
Anyway, so the insulation in going in between those ceiling joists and hopefully it'll all be strong enough to hold the drywall. Just to recap if you haven't been following along, in this part of the house the roof is only 6 inches above the plaster ceiling so there isn't any room to add insulation between them. So this "drop ceiling" will hold the insulation for the back and everywhere else I'm planning on using blown-in cellulose insulation over the existing ceiling (I guess you could say in the "attic").
When I first envisioned this months ago, I thought I could just toenail studs into the previous ceiling and the ceiling joists above. The more I thought about it the more I realized it would be difficult and messy to drive nails though the plaster and lathe trying to hit the joists above. So instead, I decided to frame a box around the room attached to the walls. First we nailed one 2x6 against one wall with fluted masonry nails. The same kind some previous owner had used to attach furring strips when they put up the wood paneling. Those suckers didn't want to come out either. Check out the back right side of the room and you can see big holes in the plaster left from trying to remove them (view image). Unfortunately the 2x6's were a little too thick and the masonry nails were only going in to the plaster and not so much brick. So when we put up the 2x6 on the other side we used lag bolts and lead anchors in the brick and that seemed to work fairly well. Anyway, after we wedged in the cross pieces nice and tight and hung them with steel joist hangers so everything is solid now. I might add some steel straps between the new joists and the old joists just for extra support.
I ended up having to knock all the plaster off the ceiling, though. I was trying to avoid making any more of a mess than I had to but ceiling was sagging in the middle which got in the way of the joists going up straight. Plaster, plaster, plaster. Man, I'm really sick of plaster. It never ends.
Oh yeah, and a screwdriver and a square metal file fell out of the ceiling this time. So far, I've had a piece of glass, a mirror, a hammer and scraps of wood fall out of the ceiling trying to kill me. Now I can add screwdriver and metal file to that list (and my toolbox).