Can I Keep My Old Ceiling With My Buildout? – DSP 264

Hopefully everyone had a lovely time at the Friday Activities and the after-party.

Ashkahn is still busy running the conference, but Graham and Jake have stepped in to talk about construction!

Today the guys talk about keeping a drop ceiling or T-bar ceiling in an existing space that you’re converting to a float center. The short answer is don’t keep it, as it can cause problems, but the guys do have some workarounds if your landlord is opposed to changing the ceiling.

Check out FloatConference.com for talk schedules and booth information. It’s going to be another beautiful, amazing Conference day!

Listen to Just the Audio

Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: All right, hey, everybody. Graham over here.

Jake: Hey, Old Salty.

Graham: Or whatever.

Jake: Jake, over here.

Graham: No Ashkahn with us today, but instead we’re going to be answering-I was going to say all your construction questions, but I guess really just a single-

Jake: Probably just one.

Graham: -one construction question is what’s on the docket.

Jake: Little taste. Little morsel.

Graham: Today’s question is, “Is it okay to keep the drop ceilings in the space I’m moving into? It used to be medical offices.”

Jake: Short answer, no. It’s not ideal, by any means.

Graham: This is my instinct whenever a question starts with, “Should I keep blank in my float center when I’m moving in?” My instinct is always no, because we’ve been burned so many times by trying to keep different amounts of construction there. I always just assume we’re going to have to tear everything out.

Jake: I wanted to keep a stray cat once when I moved into a space. It didn’t pan out well for me.

Graham: Sure, yeah, biological organisms also problematic, even just in the construction materials, it rarely works. Float centers are just so demanding and so precise with what we need, trying to keep anything that was there before is probably going to cause even more problems and more headaches in the long run than just getting rid of it.

Jake: This in particular. This drop ceiling, this T-bar ceiling, this grid ceiling. The problem is humidity. The problem is moisture.

Graham: I guess you naming it all those different things made me realize maybe we should actually describe what this is.

Jake: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Graham: You’ve seen them before. It is that kind of gridded ceiling. It usually has some kind of metal framing or metal framework bar grid.

Jake: T-bar.

Graham: The T-bar is going across the entire ceiling, and then panels that sit within them.

Jake: They’re usually, it’s decorative. They’re concealing duct work or conduits.

Graham: If you look up in your dentist’s office, or just in any kind of office space, you’re very likely to find them.

Jake: Very common.

Graham: In a classroom, very likely to see those things. I remember sitting in my classrooms as a kid, looking up and seeing the ones that had been damaged by water.

Jake: Throwing a pencil into those.

Graham: Sure, throwing a pencil into them.

Jake: Try and get the pencil to stick into it. If the pencil can stick into it, as you can see, moisture can probably get inside there.

Graham: Ah, good transition.

Jake: They’re very porous. They hold a lot of moisture and you have this weird temperature differential between, especially if it’s above your float room, between your room and what’s above that space. So that can lead to real issues of humidity building up. What do you do if the landlord, assuming you’re leasing the space, won’t let you pull it out, because they don’t want to deal with it afterwards? We’ve seen that a couple of times.

What we’ve recommended to people, and what they’ve done, is they swapped out those cellulose, or mineral wool, or a bunch of other things that we were just looking into of what they’re made of, with vinyl panels. 2×4 panels that fit right into that grid, and then we’ll have them use some contractor grade silicone, some caulk around the edges, try to keep out that moisture from the float rooms. But definitely, not ideal, by any means.

Graham: You have a few things going on with the drop ceiling, typically, that aren’t ideal. One is they’re often made out of materials that moisture, if it can’t immediately damage, which often it can, thinking back to the ceiling panels that get kind of rained out and stuff. Or at the very least, they have these holes that sound can get through. So they’re not the perfect panels to have up there, even if you have the ceiling.

So being able to replace those with something solid, something that is 100% impermeable, and then like Jake said, the extra step, kind of siliconing those seams. Really make sure that even though you have kept to the letter of the landlord’s law, in case if it’s a requirement you have that T-bar ceiling, you still essentially, out of it created something that’s very solid and waterproof. Seamless.

Jake: There is one other thing, when you start thinking about these. They do perform differently in different environments. Up in Portland we have a lot of rain. It’s not going to survive very well here. We have a lot of moisture. I’ve seen some of these ceilings do pretty well in the mountains of Colorado, where it’s really arid, or down in Arizona, where it’s really dry and really arid, again. Just something to think about there, if you’re looking at cost. Maybe the hallways you can leave as these other type of panels, the cheaper ones, and then just use the vinyl panels, which are like 10 times as expensive as the regular ones in your float rooms.

Graham: One nice thing about them, or about having any kind of suspended ceiling like that, is really easy access above them. That’s something that-

Jake: That’s a silver lining.

Graham: -nice. I am kind of jealous. Whenever we have to make changes to our ceiling we have to cut into it, and it’s this huge, big hassle, you know?

Jake: We’re using a suspended drywall ceiling, so we’re cutting through a suspended piece of drywall, and then we’re cutting through another layer of drywall to get to things.

Graham: In an ideal world, you can just have a regular ceiling. And then beyond that, I still like a suspended drywall ceiling over modified drop ceiling or T-bar ceiling, whatever you want to call it.

Jake: Yeah, when we look at minimum buyable product, like what’s the basic, we’ll start with maybe a nine foot tall room, regular drywall. If that’s not enough we’ll add some acoustical compound. We’ll throw up some soundproofing drywall right over the top of it. At Float On we have a couple of open tanks. It was determined that even that was not enough, and that’s when we implemented the suspended drywall ceiling. Kind of like the T-bar ceiling’s concept of suspending the whole ceiling from wires, but much more robust. We’re hanging soundproofing drywall. We’re using these metal studs, we’re insulating-

Graham: You’re essentially making a ceiling that’s solid, has studs, has the whole covering of the soundproofing drywall.

Jake: All hanging from cables.

Graham: And then suspended with cables. A little crazy, but same basic idea.

Jake: Yeah, definitely.

Graham: For places that have a really high vaulted ceiling, you can still have those with access above them too, which is really cool. I’m super jealous of float centers that have that.

Jake: Yeah.

Graham: So there you go. Rarely keep existing construction, including your ceiling, unfortunately.

Jake: All right, cool. Well, thanks for listening today. If you have any other questions, please send those over to floattanksolutions.com/podcast and we look forward to answering them with you.

Graham: Thanks, everyone.

Jake: Yeah.

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