There is no finish line: A penny saved is a penny ...

....used to tile!

The hint was: Abe Lincoln

I had coffee with my friend Pinterest the other morning and she told me about this FABULOUS idea of using pennies as floor tiling and counter top tiling. I was smitten. So I walked around my house (on the inside) trying to find an area in which I could do this fabulous idea...

And I found one!

Ugh. I am lying. Dammit. Super Husband found it.

The fireplace threshold in The Basement!!! Small (so it won't cost a million dollars) , flat and not right in your face so that if this project ends up sucking (and it ALMOST did), it won't be THAT noticeable. BUT, if it turns out cool (cool probably isn't the best choice of an adjective here since it's the area right in front of the fireplace...) So if it turns out smokin' - our guests can easily be directed to the area to admire our awesomeness.

The area. About 8 square feet.

The helper

It should be illegal having helpers this cute.

Pennies with love

Obviously when you tile pennies, they are not going to completely cover the area so we painted a board with black oil-based paint (gloss finish) to lay the pennies out on. Hi Patsy.

First we attached the board to the threshold

Then, we laid out the pennies. The first row is the trickiest but after that, they kind of just slide into place.

Once the pennies were all placed, the next step was going to be to do a pour-on epoxy over them...

BUT, super hubby did a little more reading and decided that we should have glued the pennies to the board. It would probably be kind of snotty for me to say something like, "I told you so" right about now so I won't.

We picked up aaaaaall of the pennies and started over again so we could glue them down.

One. By. One.

I am going to get in soooo much trouble for giving you the details I'm about to reveal but I'll take one for the team. I feel it's important to tell you all of this and about our 216 mistakes so that if you decide to take on a project like this one yourself, you won't make the same mistakes that we made. Or throw up every time you look at a penny like I do now.

Use glue that says right on the bottle that it DRIES CLEAR.

Regular Elmer's Glue that you buy for the kiddos works just fine.

NOT, this glue:

Or this will happen. It looks like snot oozed through the pennies. Gross.

So now what?!?!?!?

We start over. Sort of.

Super (pissed off) hubby sanded the glue down and made the surface all smooth again and then we just painted right over the glue and pennies with the black oil-based paint.

Once it was almost dry - still a bit tacky - we just started putting the pennies down again. It was our own sick little penny blackjack table and we kept losing.

The moment has arrived. We are gonna seal this baby and be done!

So we thought :(

If you ever use a pour-on finish, one of the steps is that once it's poured, you have to pretty much babysit it for tiny air bubbles that begin to appear.

Like this:

After a few minutes, they started to show up so we did as the directions stated and used a small torch to get rid them.

They were kinda hard to see so we plugged in our construction light to shine on the pennies so we could see the little bastards when they would make an entrance. BIG MISTAKE.

The light "baked" an area of the finish and ruined it.

SON OF A CHICKEN IN A BISCUIT!!!!!

(That's not what we really said but I'm trying to keep this blog rated PG)

So..........what in the heck do we do now? More reading. More researching. And I called Pinterest and bawled my head off . Then pouted.

What we found out: Pour-on finishes can be sanded, buffed and reapplied. Thank God. No more losing at the penny blackjack table.

Sanding was not an easy task. The air bubbles trapped the dust so an air compressor was used to clean them out. It was tedious work. Hateful, actually. All because of a hot headed light and 2 crazy people on a bubble witch hunt.

Lessons to be learned from this:

Glue the pennies down the FIRST time
Use a glue that dries clear
Don't shine a super-hot lamp on your freshly poured epoxy
Don't eat a a Fiber One bar if you have to be someplace quiet in the next 6 hours.

Ultimately, we prevailed. We always do :)

Ryan & Milissa -1 Pennies - 0

Tah-dah!

Once the penny project was complete, we were able to put up the brick.

Wasn't too tough, just super dusty.

The brick came in 6" x 24" pieces. Heavy pieces.
I am proud to say we can now add masonry work to our resumes.

We glued 'em up with a heavy duty adhesive:

April (in 16 days) Fools! Got ya, didn't I?!?!

We used this:

Ryan started in the middle to get a straight line going and then worked from there. He used the 2x6's you see here as a brace once he glued the first row.