When I bought my house, I was severely dismayed at the kitchen.  Not only was it totally the “builder’s special” with plain oak cabinets, vinyl flooring, cheap wine wall border and unpainted white walls but it had this excruciatingly ugly green laminate counter top.  I always vowed I would do “something” with it, but just hadn’t quite decided what.  It was either cover it with a different laminate design, replace them with a different laminate top altogether, save up some money and put a different material down or just live with it as-is (blah).  Then I saw something on Craftster about someone painting their counter tops from pink to a dark marble-like brown and orange.  I figured that it couldn’t be too hard, but I wasn’t a huge fan of her method.  So after seeing the $300 box kits from Lowe’s that wouldn’t cover all of my counters I challenged myself that I could do this for under $100.  Starting during the time off I had from work for Spring Break and with a Lowe’s gift card in hand (thanks to my superstar Verizon Wireless cell phone hawking husband), I bought all of the supplies I thought I would need to tackle this DIY disaster in the making.

I decided to start the project with a sanding of the entire surface.  I’m not exactly the most buff of women when it comes to upper body strength, but it had to be done manually in order to catch all of the corners and rounded edges adequately.  After this, I started with a base coat of black paint:

followed by a sponge paint application of varying greys.  This is the first run through of a medium grey.  It’s very hard to avoid a pattern look after doing this for a period of time:

but since I would be putting multiple layers of color on top I just left it as is.  I wanted a bit of the black to show through from the base coat, so fixing it would just cover up the black.  Here is another coat of some grey levels where you can see that I didn’t get to the portion of the bar that hangs over the dining room:

Finally after adding some yellow, brown and a midnight blueish black, here it is finished with the paint:

Then comes the hard part.  In order to protect the surface from scratches, peeling, sun effects and heat, you have to apply a coating.  I chose to go with pour-on epoxy, the same stuff that people who make bars in their basement use.  Since the surface area was so big, I had to use several boxes of it, and it has to self-level as it dries so you cannot add another layer until it has somewhat cured.  Here’s the first layer where you can see the ripples caused by unevenness as it dried:

And here it is after several layers of epoxy and a couple of days later:

There are some touch ups that I need to make and some scratches caused by somebody (!) in my house not using a cutting board, so I’ll need to do another coat of epoxy at some point.  The beauty of this surface though is that if I do get scratches or a burn mark, all I need to do is sand it down and recoat with epoxy – ding! done.

So $90 and 4 days later, I don’t have to look at ugly green builder’s special laminate counter tops.  It’s possible that I may just spend the money to change it to something newer/better, but for now it was a very cheap fix to something I hated.  Now to change the floor, wall color and maybe even paint the cabinets.

Where oh where will I ever find the time?