To many people, a penny isn’t worth the time that it takes to pick it up—but not for DIY enthusiast Tonya Tooners. After gathering and sorting a staggering 13,000 pennies ($130), she arranged them into a stunning design on a floor in her home. From afar, you wouldn’t realize they were coins—Tooners’ attention to detail and patterning give them the appearance of tile.
The decor project was a tedious undertaking. “I started by measuring the area [of the room] and finding the center,” Tooners described on Imgur. Afterwards, she drew an axis as a guide and started gluing the coins in a diamond shape—purposely using different-colored pennies (alternating between heads and tails) to provide a striking visual contrast. Once Tooners got to the edge, she created a border—an addition that gives it a distinctly vintage feel. Aside from the pennies, Tooners used 10 bottles of Elmer’s glue, grout, wood filler, and “expensive epoxy” to make her dream a reality.
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