Well, hubby and I have modern industrial and somewhat retro tastes. We’ve been in the process of remodeling our kitchen and while working on a hydraulic shelf that will come down from the ceiling, hubby took a break and started watching some videos. He saw a gorgeous floor done with pennies and showed it to me. Although I loved it, it wasn’t feasible for our mobile home. I remembered seeing a video of a table someone made with CDS and after a Google search, found it and showed it to hubby. HE LOVED IT! We decided to go with it for a portion of our countertop and it turned out better than what we ever expected. Below is the picture of our strange little kitchen after we took out some cabinets. The long counter in the bottom of the picture is what we decided to cover with the discs.
After researching the project, we decided to use DVDS instead of CDS because of the luminous shine. The CDs are very pretty but the colors are a bit more muted than the DVD. The first part of the project was purchasing the DVDS and separating the shiny foil side from the plastic side. Oh my! What a chore!!
Using a pair of kitchen shears, I cut the side of the DVD and using my fingernails, slowly separated the two sides. I tried my best to keep as much foil on one side of the DVD but sometimes the disc just didn’t cooperate. It’s not an issue as once the disc is separated, we just cut the plastic part that we wanted. Once you have all your discs separated, you will need to cut them up. It’s not easy going and sometimes they break but for us, it didn’t matter, we used different shapes and sizes, even using some that parts of the foil came off. I will say that if you can, try to avoid touching the color, it leaves marks and finger prints.
Once we had all of the discs sperated and cut up, I painted the countertop with a dark grey porch and patio paint that we had leftover from another project. I started with just a small part at a time. The different tutorials on this project said to glue down the pieces of DVD but none shared what type of glue so I started with just plain old Elmer’s white glue. It was messy going and I often got glue on the color side and knew it was going to be quite time consuming to clean off. Hubby suggested that I use a paint brush and brush the glue over the paint and then lay my pieces down. Sounded like a good idea at the time and I tried that but it was still messy and I found out that once the glue dried, you could peel it off ( made me feel like a kid when I used to put glue on the palms of my hands just so I could peel it off 😀). I knew that trying to peel off the dried glue from around the discs was going to be a problem. I thought to myself, what if, I laid the DVDs down while the paint was still wet? I tried that and it was genius!! I was able to work quick and I didn’t have to worry about cleaning off the glue. We both decided that we were not going to need to grout it and once we poured the epoxy resin, the discs were not going anywhere!
Once all the discs were laid out, we decided to put a border up. We were going to wait until after we poured the epoxy but realized that a border would help contain the resin. Hubby went to the hardware store and picked up some aluminum border. We’re using paintable wallpaper on our ceiling and decided to wrap the border with the same. After thinking it though, we realized that the edge of the border, covered in wallpaper, would tear over use so back to the store hubby went. He went to the auto parts store and picked up some door trim used for cars. Brilliant idea! It just slid right onto the edge and gave the countertop a finished look.
Final and daunting step was to pour the epoxy resin. We utilized the help of a friend that had experience. He mixed it up and poured it out. Some of the other tutorials say to use a hairdryer to get the air bubbles out of the resin but we just used a spreader to even out the epoxy and the air bubbles came out on their own.
72 hours later, after the epoxy has cured, we have a beautiful, unique countertop 😀. I am sure that I have forgotten something in my tutorial so feel free to ask any questions and I will try to answer them as quickly and concisely as possible.
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