my room is roughly 12 feet by 12 feet by 12 feet. sounds simple, right? run a bunch of 12 feet beams from one end of the room to another, and you got a scaffold upon which a ceiling can rest, illustrated above. it was almost that simple, except for a few minor details.

the few minor details...

a) a quarter of my room is partitioned off by a window. not a window to the outside, but a window into my hallway (why such a thing would exist is beyond me). in any case, the window doesn't fully extend up to the height of the rest of the walls, so 2x10" beams were used to have the windows' height become flush with the rest of the room.

b) i have a 1 foot by 1 foot post running through my room. removing this post would result in the building to collapse, so that was not an option. instead, the ceiling (which is 1/4" drywall sheets) had to be scored and cut (a la bob villa's discovery channel home improvement shows)... you can kind of see a piece of the drywall bending downward. since it's so thin, it's a bit flimsy, so i'm probably going to have to add an extra L-bracket to keep it up.

c) one thing to consider was the way the 12-foot beams were going to be fixed to the wall. my original plan was to route a wooden lip around the entire around upon which the beams would sit, but a much more subtle way to go about this was to use a simple metal bracket. it works pretty well, and using drywall anchors and screws, each bracket could hold up to 60 pounds, which is more than enough for this project.

from this next picture, you can hardly notice the brackets. pretty seamless, i must say!

d) finally, to get a sense of how this all worked out, the bathroom connected to my room (which of course, is the only room that actually has a ceiling) flows very well with the rest of room. i.e., there's no gaping hole right outside its door. all in all, i say this was a job well done!