Eliesa Prettelt of Fort Pierce, Florida, didn’t like the dated granite countertops in her home's bar area, but she also knew replacing them would cost several thousand dollars. So, she got creative — and crafty! — and painted them to look like marble.
“I’ve painted floor tiles and a granite backsplash in one of our old houses, but never a countertop before,” Prettelt, who runs the blog Pinterest Addict, told TODAY Home.
The whole project took about a week altogether, she said, adding that most of the time was spent allowing the layers of paint to dry completely. “The actual painting part took a few hours each day."
So, how’d she do it? First, Prettelt cleaned the countertops well and painted them with a coat of glossy surface primer that she had tinted gray. After it was dry (24 hours later), she began making it look like marble with white and gray paint she already had on hand.
For the veining effect, she took some of the silver and gray paint, dipped a feather in it, and ran it over the top randomly.
Her most challenging part? Worrying too much about perfection. “It was a lot of blending and feathering of the grays into the whites, and I kept trying to make it more perfect, and would end up overdoing it,” she said. “Toward the end of the project, I figured out that less was more.”
But overall, she loved the final look and would do it again.
“From a few feet away, it completely looked like the real thing,” she said, adding that guests were mostly surprised when they found out it was painted.
Prettelt has since moved from the house so she doesn’t know how the counters are currently holding up, but she said she didn’t have any problems with peeling while she was still there.
“The area around the sink in the bar area was constantly wet because I made coffee there daily, and washed dishes in that sink all the time,” she explained. “It looked a million times better than the builder’s grade granite that was there, and it held up to what we used it for.”
The whole project was really budget-friendly, too. “I couldn’t have replaced it even with a wood counter for what I paid for the paint,” she said.
See exactly how Prettelt did this project on her blog Pinterest Addict.
