Hi, we recently decided to take an old, dirty dropped ceiling out of our basement as we wanted more height. What we ended up doing was having someone else come in and apply a "dry fall" paint to the entire ceiling. This is the coating that you see in some modern restaurants and bars, usually where they have a pretty tall ceiling and exposed ductwork . It's a spray on coating that will cover EVERYTHING: beams, joists, metal ducts, pipes, etc. This way we avoided having to seperately prime and paint everything according to the material and it gives a smooth, matte finish. It's latex based, so while it's kind of stinky for a few days the fumes aren't flammable. The cleanup wasn't fun, but we think it was well worth it. We're doing at least 90% of the work ourselves on the space, but considering how hard it is to paint overhead, and the sheer volume of paint you would have to buy to do the job, we really think it was a good idea. We didn't even have to clean aside from knocking down the bigger spider webs - it literally sticks to anything except grease or oil. Bonus: it looks really cool! The paint contractor was a bit hesitant about doing it in a house, but after he saw the results he's planning to come back and take photos of the finished room to use for marketing it to homeowners. I don't know what your plans are for the space, and how finished you want it to be, but this really worked out well for us.

We recently started using a portion of our basement for a tv/family room and although we didn't plan on an expensive "finishing" project we wanted to do something to make it more familyroom-like. We painted drylock on the walls and used a special paint made for cement floors. We dusted off all the ceiling beams and removed any extra nails or things that were sticking out of the beams.(our house is 65 years old so there were alot of weird things nailed, screwd etc.)I had gotten the idea for the ceiling from those restaurants like pizzaria uno, etc. that show all their industrial workings. We first applied black primer then black paint (flat) it looks really cool and makes the otherwise obvious exposed beams dissapear. and when you are looking at them they are clean and attractive! It was ALOT of work though, so maybe the "dry fall" stuff is a better option, but I have never heard of this so don't know about it.