She Lines Up $150 In Pennies On An Ugly Floor. Days Later, It Looks Like A Million Bucks
For most of us, decorating a home is a great way to let your personality shine!
Tonya recently decided to revamp her floors – but instead of using hardwood or tile, she opted to use pennies!
It sounds odd but wait till you see the stunning final result below!
She withdrew $150 in pennies from the bank, and began to sort them into shiny and tarnished piles to create a color-contrasting pattern on the floor.
She used plain old Elmer’s glue to lay the pennies, grout, and epoxy for the project.
She started by measuring out the space, and laying a grid to work on.
Then, she started laying pennies by working from the center of the grid outward in a diamond pattern.
The contrasting pennies were put to work in the main pattern that takes up most of the floor, alternating diamonds of shiny pennies and tarnished pennies.
It’s a simple but elegant pattern that takes its cues from the look of old-fashioned hardwood parquet, which used contrasting colors of wood.
For this floor, the pennies served the same purpose.
Over the course of the project, she discovered she wouldn’t have enough dark or tarnished pennies to complete the pattern, so she improvised, and ended up dying a few of the shinier pennies with liver of sulfur, a gel which gives metal a blue-black patina.
As she progressed towards the edges of the room, the pattern started to get more elaborate as she created a “frame” for the simpler pattern in the center.
The edges feature a slightly more elaborate diamond pattern, where each diamond is made up of contrasting stripes of shiny and dark pennies.
This variation on the diamond pattern then turns into a simple zigzag.
The zigzag edge stretches around the room, covering up just about everything but the corners.
For those, she went with a simple filler pattern of shiny pennies interspersed with a few regular intervals of tarnished accent pennies.
After the grout was laid, her flooring pattern was pretty stable and unlikely to pull up again the way it might have with glue, but it still needed to be polished off and given some shine.
In order to finish off the flooring, she coated the whole floor with several layers of shiny epoxy.
The epoxy creates a laminated effect over the surface of the pennies, further cementing them in place, protecting them from wear and tear, and giving the floor a beautiful, shiny finish!
Up close, the work is even more impressive, as you can see the level of detail put into the project — for example, Lincoln’s profile on the penny is facing the same direction every time it appears!
Are you as impressed with this gorgeous labor of love as we are? It just goes to show how far a simple penny can go!
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