I am currently working on a portion of our basement. This one room (we call the wine room), is the back entrance to our raised Craftsman. We park inside our detached garage, walk across some yard, and into a small door, then up the stairs and into the kitchen.

The stairwell is visible from the kitchen through a 12 light door. We finally removed the ugly wine wallpaper and painted it all out white. We will add white storage cabinets to the wine room and we also have wood wine storage racks.

MY DILEMMA is the ceiling. it is only 6'4" tall. The joists are uneven. We cannot just paint it out as we have knob-and-tube wiring that anyone could just reach up and grab. We are able to install drywall or another nice ceiling cover, but are wondering if painting the ceiling black would look and feel good? We are just trying to make it feel/appear a bit taller in there. My lighting is all perimeter (on the white walls) so its not in the eyes, As well as the lit stairwell and lighted frosted glass cabinets in the storage cabinets. And there are 2 windows at 30" x 30" each.