If you ceiling looks really awful and you think it will take a lot of money and time to fix it, you should think of installing a suspended ceiling as they are quite cheap and fast to install compared to other ceilings.
Suspended ceiling consist of various panels that are placed below your original ceiling, so it are a very good choice as it conceals the surface below. A very positive side of suspended ceiling is that even after you have installed it you can easily access the surface below to install wiring or in case you need to do some other repair work, for example to fix pipes. Suspended ceilings are also used in noisy places or offices as they are very good sound barriers and special acoustic panels can be used. To add lights to the ceiling it is very comfortable, because suspended ceilings consist of different plates and to add a light the plate only has to be lifted and the light added.
Suspended ceilings offer a big variety as their patterns differ from most common hard plastic finish to beautiful soft pattern plates. Most of the suspended ceiling panels can also be washed easily that is a very important special quality. And when something happens to one of the panels it is not very hard to change only one of them, instead of changing the entire ceiling.