Hand Painted Marble Floor

We originally painted this foyer with a faux marble tile finish in September of 2008 and it looked great.

Near the end of 2015 our client asked us to repaint it exactly the same. The floor was damaged by a contractor and she wanted it ready for traffic before her "Post Christmas Party" on Jan. 9, 2016.

The party was a smashing success - excellent food and drink provided by Jeanie Gruber. Here is a time lapse movie featuring our hand painted floor, created during the festivities.

For those interested in the process, I thought I would give you a "How To" on marbleizing. We started with a white floor and first had to map out the grid making sure it lines up with the pre existing floor mural in the dining room as well as the walls in the foyer. For the layout we use lasers and for this white marble tile pattern, we drew a thin pencil line at each intersection to represent the grout. Once the grid is mapped out, Lena and Kasia added the white / gray marbling. For this they use tinted glaze, rags, feathers, fan brushes, stipplers and Badger hair softeners. First they paint the glaze on in drifts, rag it off, add veins with the feather and fan brush, blend with the stippler and finally soften with light sweeps of the Badger Brush.

Stippeling

Raging the glaze

Cutting through with a feather

Adding a vein with a fan brush

Softening the finish with a badger brush

When this is done and dry we added the darker greenish marble tiles at each intersection using tape because stencils leaked too much.

When they were dry we brought in Bob Tucker of Peabody Floors. We needed a non yellowing, water based, hard, quick dry product. To achieve this Bob suggested a first coat of VerMeister Aqua Tenax two component sealer followed by a coat of VerMeister Idro two-component polyurethane NMP-free waterborne, non-yellowing finish. As you can see, the end result was stunning and what you can't see is it is very hard.

Thank you to all who were involved with this project and if you have any questions I did not answer above, please contact me for more. We have no secrets.