As much as I love my house, there is one major feature that I don't love- the drop ceiling!
Unfortunately it's a prominent feature that's difficult to ignore throughout the house- every single room throughout the house has dropped ceilings, except for my dining room and breezeway, which have paneled wood ceilings.
Whenever I sit down to make a list of all the things I want to do to my house- i of course want to start with the easy stuff, right? Paint, new floors, maybe switch out some stuff in the kitchen...it all comes back to those ceilings and an order of operations. At this point the elephant in the room is the ceiling. It's now or never if it's going to come down, because it's going to be a messy ordeal when it does!
I don't have a good idea when this drop ceiling was put in the house- at my closing, I got a box of paperwork from the seller and was able to discern that she paid for a major renovation to the back half of the house in the early 1980s, and the receipts for the drop ceiling in the basement were in there. (That was the beginning of the "red carpet" era in the back half of the house.) 
To me, my drop ceiling is a dated feature that's hard to ignore! It kind of reminds me of being in an office building or a grade school- so it's got to go!
When a building has a drop ceiling, it's usually been installed to hide some kind of feature in the building, like ductwork or electrical wiring. Usually drop ceilings are held up by some kind of grid suspension system made out of aluminum and wire and then the ceiling tiles are placed in the grid. (Most ceiling tiles now are made of mineral fiber, but in older buildings tiles can be made of pressed corrugate or even contain asbestos.)
When I had my home inspection and they poked around in the attic they found I have a WOOD suspension system holding up my ceiling, a unique suspension system consisting of roughly 1x1 inch studs. We will be tearing it down and replacing my ceiling with drywall so I have a nice flat ceiling!
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