Finishing my own Basement

My basement consists of our drive-under two-car garage and originally two unfinished room locations.  I finished the first room as our kid's playroom in January of 2001, and then I finished the second room as my wife's craft/sewing room in January 2002.  Last year we worked outside to install a patio under the deck, and then finished with a pond in the spring.  Anyhow, my point that I'm getting to is that I never did do anything for a ceiling in the two rooms when I created them.  I don't really know why, other than the fact that I had never messed with the drop-down suspended ceilings before.  I didn't have those same reservations about building walls and installing wiring, since I had helped my Dad and others many times with similar tasks over the years.  But drop-down ceilings just seemed weird to me, and all the books and stuff have barely a page or two about doing it yourself.  Well, we really needed to do these ceilings, especially since we may try to sell our house and get a bigger one in the next year or two, so I committed to doing it this month.  As it turns out, one of my friends had recently done a drop-down ceiling in his basement, and he gave me a day of his help last weekend as my Christmas present.  It turned out to be really easy -- just careful measuring and other routine tasks.  We probably could have done both rooms, but I didn't want to ask my friend for too much when we could better spend his time drinking and watching movies.  So yesterday I did the second room's drop-down ceiling by myself, which was just a wonderful couple of hours.  What does this have to do with .NET -- nothing really, but I'll make something up if you insist.  I put off my building my own O/R mapper for similar reasons, that being that it was just something I hadn't done before.  But in the end, as long as you have all the basics down, sometimes it is relatively easy to just do things yourself.  You get the pleasure of doing it, learn something in the process, potentially save lots of money, and end up with something customized just for you, instead of something costly that someone else did that may have somewhat better quality but isn't really exactly to your liking.