The penny is the lowest form of the American currency and most people just ignore them. These pennies are found everywhere from couch cushions to the parking lots of grocery stores. Nobody really knows what to do with them. This woman, however, knew exactly what to do with them as she threw thousands and thousands of pennies on the floor and designed herself a penny floor.
Tonya Tooners made use of $130 worth of pennies and used “10 bottles of Elmer’s glue, some grout I found in my basement, and some damn expensive epoxy (~$150), a tub of wood filler because plywood is holey and pennies are small, and a few pieces of wood.”
Tonya first measured the exact center of the room and drew an axis to guide her Then she arranged the pennies in a diamond shape and allowed the whole system to rest and for the glue to dry and kept on adding the next set of pennies to the penny floor.
Looking at the pennies, you can see the time and effort Tonya put on the penny floor and how it has been completely transformed.
“Working toward the second corner,” Tonya wrote. “You can see my bowls of sorted pennies. The big silver bowl in the back are the ones that were in the gray area between shiny and dark. I later used those too.”
“Here’s where I started realizing that there were not going to be enough dark pennies,” she explained. “Bought some liver of sulfur to turn them a blue-purple-black color. Since there was suddenly a new shade I had to go back through the pennies I had already laid and pry up some of the naturally tarnished ones and replace them.”
After covering the whole room she applied a final layer of epoxy which gives the penny floor a lustrous and shiny look. She also alternated between heads and tails of every two coins. You can imagine how long that must have taken but in the end, it was worth every penny. “You can see the pennies alternate heads/tails and all face the same direction because I’m crazy and I hate myself,” Tonya joked. It truly does look marvelous.
