January Project - Countertop Painting in Brookfield

In September 2022, my basement flooded, and due to the water damage, there was a LOT of work done in the basement, finishing in January 2023. Because of all the work in the basement, my home was a mess for quite a while!

When the contractor started to put things back together, I decided to go ahead and do a few things upstairs as well. One of those things was to replace the bedroom carpeting. While I was at it, I also wanted the baseboards and walls painted.

So, once the walls and baseboards were painted, I realized just how bad the countertop on the vanity in my bedroom was. The 1980’s yellow was just horrible against the gray and white tones that I had picked for my new colors.

I looked into replacing the countertop – but it was several hundred dollars, so I decided to try my hand at painting it first. If I messed it up, I could always replace the countertop – but I figured giving this a try at less than $100 was worth it.

The painting was easy, but it took time. Each coat needed to dry at least 6 hours before the next coat. I ended up using 3 coats of white.

Then, I wanted to add a marble look to it. I took some white paint, added some black and made a gray paint. Then I made arbitrary lines on the counter with a small paintbrush. The next step was to dab at the line with a sponge. Third, I brushed the line with a dry brush. Last, I rolled lightly over the line with the white.

It turned out great!

After the paint was dry, I added the poly to the top – that was the most difficult part – to get that smooth. The trick seems to be multiple very thin layers.

A few of the key take away from this:

1. Learning how to do things on YouTube is awesome.

2. Painting a countertop can turn out better than expected!

3. Poly needs to go on in very light coats.