Huzzah

After this week, we needed something exciting. Something GOOD exciting, not golfball sized hail. Or softball sized as was reported a block down the road.

No, we needed some good old fashioned DIY home improvement handy ass something to keep us excited about this project.

On Friday, the backsplash panels arrived! Yay! I did not jynx their arrival as I feared. Our bathroom towel bar has arrived, as well, though it's not been installed yet. Now if I can just find my drawer pulls, I can declare the bathroom as done as it's getting for a while. They've been, ahem, misplaced.

So, the backsplash. We unwrapped the panels and propped them up on the counter and they were, well, bright.


A little too shiny. So I made a trip to Michaels and Hobby Lobby and we did a few tests. First, we tried 3 different "bronze" paints:


We used a flat black spray paint, and did 2 coats, one coat and none, then tried each of the 3 paints. One was a Spanish copper Rub N Buff, one was DecoArts Metallic paint in Espresso, and the best one, the one on the left, was Sophisticated Finishes in Blackened Bronze. It's actually bronze finely ground and combined with an acrylic medium. Next, we painted the whole panel solid matte black and daubed the whole thing with the bronze:


First, I brushed it on, then patted it with the foam brush to get rid of the brush strokes, then patted it with a dry foam brush to knock down the foamy air bubbles that the foam brush was leaving. I had a system. Then we hit it with a glossy polyurethane.



Aaaaaand........it looked like a Hershey bar. We tried it with a satin finish and it didn't look any better. I thought maybe a copper base coat would be best, so I ran to the store and bought a can of Krylon Outdoor copper paint. The plan was to just paint over the choco bar, since the metal primer I bought is brown...But I thought I'd try misting it first. And it looked great! It's much better!


We think so, anyway. We'll look at it in the daylight and decide for certain. The left side, with the glossy poly underneath, looks better. But we'll try it tomorrow using the brown primer, and eliminating the black and poly steps to see if it comes out the same. We may also see what happens with the copper as base coat. But at least we know we have a system that works, even if it is 10 steps long...