“So this one time, in the showroom…” We’ve all got a story that starts out like that around here. And I think it’s high time that we start sharing our Glorious Mis-Adventures from the Showroom with you!
A common theme about all of us here about Builders Glass is that we are all very passionate about what we do and take pride in our work. And in our field of business, we get to be creative – we’re glass artists! And in order to create beautiful masterpieces, we have to be willing to get a bit dirty. Or in this case royal blue…
Creating our under the stairs wine cellar was a huge trial and error type deal – especially that back wall. We didn’t know if we wanted to finish it off with Stik Wood, leave the exposed brick, or try something new that we hadn’t tried before. What we DID know was that we wanted it to be something outside of our immediate comfort zone so… something we hadn’t tried before it was going to be.
Leslie had originally envisioned this huge piece of Mondrian inspired painted glass. Well, something along those lines. It started out with us taping lines onto this big sheet of glass that our glass fabricating team had cut for us. We positioned, and re-positioned, and re-adjusted again until we liked what we had. Two simple lines, one horizontal, one vertical, along the long side of the glass and across just below the half way point. The design was great!
Except we ran into some… technical complications.
First off. While the design would have been GREAT, we kept chipping the paint anytime we tried to take the tape off. And filling in the chips with more paint was making it just look – botched. That and, we weren’t digging our original color choices. So we scraped it all off and started again!
But this time we added our ever favorite iridescent paint – nope, that’s not what happened because we were out of it! That was the plan though. So instead we settled for trying a metallic silver shimmer paint. Cool right? It was! But… it dried weird and cracked and flaked off and we think it was because we had put it on too thick.
So we scraped it off. Again.
Go around number three and we got the shimmer to stick! However, it turned out that the metallic, grey, silver sparkles were not going to work out as fabulously as we had imagined. Unlike the iridescent sparkle paint, the grey sparkle looked murky in front of the colored paint and it overall had a dirty appearance. SO… we scraped it again!!
Now, when I say scrape it, I mean LITERALLY, a group of us standing there trading off razor blades and paint scrapers spraying the paint down with thinners and SCRAPING it off the glass so that we could repaint the surface again. It was a fun time. No really! We did enjoy doing it! It got us away from our desks and moving a bit so we weren’t so zombie like. And being able to see who can tear off the largest sheet without it breaking? A contest that has yet to be matched.
We finally painted the glass a solid egg shell color that had a gold sheen to it. It looked REALLY cool. But it just didn’t look right, ya know? There was just something with the color that wasn’t vibing with us. So, again, we cleared the glass.
We had these two blue colors, a peacock and a royal blue. And we only had small jars of each. Basically, they were sample jars… because that’s why we had gotten them.
So, seeing as we love to scrape paint off of glass, we put BOTH on it! Just to see how it would look and which one we liked more. We went with the royal blue, which is kind of like a metallic paint, so it worked GREAT for us since it has that shimmery effect that we love without having to put a sparkle paint layer on first!
So, for the last time, we cleaned the glass surface off and started applying the royal blue to the back!
When it was done, and covered, we were really proud with what we had. Until we realized that the layer of paint that we had on it was too thin and we could see right through it. We couldn’t get anymore of the royal blue paint, so with fingers crossed we took a leap of faith and layered on the rest of the peacock color. AND IT WORKED!!!
Once everything was dry, our installers inserted the glass in it’s permanent home as the back wall of our wine cellar and we are SOOOOO happy with it. It also is a huge reminder of the fun day that we had and the laughs that never get old.
You can see the real life piece of royal blue back painted glass in our showroom, so come visit us and get inspired!
