If you're looking to add an office, a family room, a game room, a play area for the kids or extra bedrooms, your basement might work very well. Basements, however, present design challenges. They tend to be dark and can feel confined, with small windows, structural columns and low ceilings to hide plumbing and heating pipes. You can make a low basement ceiling seem higher with several different methods.
Instructions
1. Paint the room in light colors or apply light-colored wallpaper, and paint the ceiling lighter than the walls to draw eyes upward. Use a shade or two lighter than the wall colors or an off-white. Applying paint with a glossy sheen to the ceiling can help reflect light and make the room seem bigger and brighter.
2. Paint subtle vertical stripes on the walls with a color and a or darker. Vertical lines add height in home decor just as they do in fashion. Instead of paint, you also can apply striped wallpaper of tone-on-tone color.
3. Avoid horizontal lines in the room as much as possible. For instance, groups of paintings, prints or photographs can be placed in a step pattern or asymmetrically. You might want to dispense with a long couch in favor of easy chairs and love seats.
4. Avoid adding light fixtures to the ceiling, particularly chandelier styles, because these draw attention to the low ceiling. Use floor lamps or table lamps instead.
5. Place furniture against outer corners and walls, leaving an open space from the entrance way to the middle of the room. Having an open floor plan makes the room look bigger and creates the illusion of a higher ceiling.
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