DIY Project: Our Penny Floor

Now that my husband and I are officially “empty nesters”, we are beginning to have fun redecorating some of our extra bedrooms. My hubby has decided to convert one of the rooms into a man cave. The carpet needed replacing and the room is in a basement. We thought a “penny floor” would work well.

There are several web pages from fellow Do-It-Yourself folks who have happily installed floors made of coins… I thought it would be fun to share our progress with this project on some weekend post.2015-11-02 19.16.18

After ripping out the carpet, Rob (my husband), elected to stain the floor. By the way, our basement floor in this room is level. It was something we did when we moved into our home. You do want to start with a level floor before installing the pennies.

We have also decided to add some designs to the floor, including a compass and a border.

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We started with our own pennies and, not too surprising… we had just enough to just barely get started. Since we want to get this done hopefully before Christmas, we decided to go to the bank and make a withdrawal. We had to order the pennies from the bank – this just took a couple days.

We are using a 12 x 12 picture frame to create tiles that we’ll use for a majority of the floor. (I’ll get more into that later).  There are about 255 pennies in a square foot tile. After measuring our room, we were able to determine how many pennies we may need to complete the project.

Our evenings are currently being spent unrolling pennies and separating the “brand new” bright pennies and very dark pennies from the rest of the mix. We Porters sure know how to have fun!

We have found a design of a compass on the great world wide web and we’re using that for a template. After deciding where we wanted the compass to be, we measured where the center of it should be and started with gluing our first coin. We are setting the pennies for the compass by hand.

Here’s our first night’s progress. Notice the carpet padding I’m using for my knees!

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The “bright” pennies that we started with are not nearly as bright as the brand new ones that came in our mix from the bank. Here’s our progress from the second night. You can see we’ve added additional cushions!! By the way, I highly recommend taking breaks to get up and walk around even though it’s exciting as it is to glue pennies to the floor see your project evolve.

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The compass is really coming along! Our biggest challenge is finding enough dark pennies and keeping it aligned correctly. 😉

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Rob started testing out the pennies that he prepared with contact paper.

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I will try to post updates of our progress (assuming we made any!!) on Saturdays. I’ll keep my articles about my day job (helping people with mortgages) on weekdays.

Stay tuned!

Check out our progress… click here for week two! 

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