Things around here have been a wee bit disrupted lately. The new Star Wars powder room was a minor addition to a larger repair that my house decided it needed. I've been pretty lucky on this front since I bought the place, but this time my luck ran out.
I discovered that the minor leak in my kitchen tap was actually a massive leak behind the tap, rotting out part of the floor under the sink. I'd always been told that it was normal in this area to have a wet basement, but it turns out that my wet basement was an innie, not an outie.
Fast forward to the end of a semi-massive kitchen repair. To get at the area and repair the floor and wall, the majority of my kitchen counter had to be removed and since part had to be replaced anyhow, I had the guys just replace all of it with plain wood.
Plain wood you say? Who has plain wood counters?
Not me. Eventually.
While I was booking the repair work and trying to find a cool but cheap flooring solution, I stumbled across something called a "penny floor" which is basically a wood floor with thousands of pennies glued to it and covered in epoxy resin.
They look amazing and I loved the idea of a having a floor that reflected my personal passion...
Pennies? Nah.
COMIC BOOKS.
Turns out you can use epoxy resin to do counter tops as well as floors. So I now have a plain wood floor and plain wood counters. And by doing epoxy resin, assuming I don't mess it up completely, I'll save a fair bit of money over premade counter tops and installed flooring.
Comic books. Under the counter and floor. Yeah. Like you didn't see that coming.
You may notice that the kitchen wall is the same shade of purple as the
new Star Wars powder room. I'm doing everything I can to keep the
expenses down, so the leftover paint from the kitchen got repurposed to
the powder room. Sometimes things just work out.
I spent a lot of time on fitting and covering the back splashes and all of them are done. I recently finished the first counter piece, which is a little island on the left side of my stove. It made a great test bed and I learned a few lessons with it.
What you see above is just the comic covers glued to the counter top, no resin yet.
And that was the hardest part. Those are real comic book covers glued to that counter top. My real comic book covers.
I have been cutting the comic book covers off dozens of books in my collection. While I was a heavy collector during the late 80s, my collection has been sitting in a room in my house in longboxes for almost 20 years without once being looked at.
As extreme as this seems, I'm actually getting more enjoyment out of my comics now than I have in decades. Literally.
That said, I had to ask my neighbour to cut the first cover off the first book. It was just so...unnatural. Once that one went, it got a lot easier.
Once I got into adding the epoxy resin on top of the comics, I learned that epoxy resin is a BITCH to deal with. They tell you to wear gloves while mixing and pouring, but if you come anywhere near it until it dries it gets on your skin and it's nearly impossible to remove.
Pouring counter tops and backsplashes involves taping off the surface to create a "bowl" to pour into, which is relatively easy. The hard part is that the tape doesn't always hold perfectly, so you end up babysitting it until it sets up. After about an hour, you remove the tape anywhere you want the epoxy to "slump" to give you rounded edges as it pours over the edge. Super messy. Like the stickiest, worst mess I've ever dealt with, ever, messy.
After two hours or so, you can remove the rest of the tape as the resin will have fully set. If you wait too long, the tape is almost impossible to remove. During all this, you have watch for surface bubbling (I'm still not great at this part) and use alcohol mist and/or heat to dissipate them. When you're checking the tape or watching for bubbles, it's easy to forget to put gloves on and if you even touch the stuff, it's on your hands and nothing will get it off. Trouble is, if you have epoxy on a glove, you have to take it off before you do anything with your hands, so you spend those two hours going through pair after pair after pair of gloves. Or you touch it without them, which sucks, BIG TIME.
The process is a timed stress/patience/focus test. With a gummy, superglue like penalty if you forget to pay attention.
I would have loved to take more "during the process" pictures, but had I done so, I'm convinced my phone would have gotten encased in epoxy and ended up a phone shaped brick of the stuff.
Here it is complete, topped with my new paper towel holder:
My inner geek has become my outer geek. And he's running riot!
This is one of those "it's evolving as I go" scenarios and as huge a pain in the ass as all this repair work and expense has been, I am loving this next stage. I hope y'all enjoy it too.
More to come!
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