man, this is taking a long time..

between life, work, family, unexpectedness and an idea that'll take longer than the second coming of christ to realize to begin with--i noticed that it's been a year or more since i started this blog to document the project that will finally become a penny covered floor in the basement of my home that will serve as my work/art studio.  i've probable mentioned this before.

progress has been slow, but it's finally coming together.  the drywall and painting is done (after a few late nights after the kids went to sleep), and i've just completed the installation of a reclaimed cedar wood wall (the wood used to serve as a dock at the family cottage, so it's nice to reuse it here for fun).

stay tuned for some more progress photos, and the beginning of what i will anticipate being a loooong installation of the penny floor.  i'm lookin' forward to it!!

back to it..

now that the summer is gone and winter is setting in quite quickly, it's time for a renewed focus on some projects--namely getting my work studio up and running.  who wants to work on renovations indoors during the summer anyway?

you'll notice the stacks of pennies in the corner there amongst some other clutter.  in the next few weeks i suspect that some of them will start getting glued to the floor...finally!  also, what you're seeing represents less than half of the floorspace that will be covered by the little copper rounds...gah.

same size, same shape...

still going through the looong process of creating the tiles for the penny floor.  found one from the Caribbean yesterday.  those crazy traveling pennies...

penny stack..

so here's what the penny stack looked like a little while ago.  i've been gathering these for a while...surprisingly, to cover the floor with pennies is quite comparable to the average cost of ceramic tiles.  the 'sweat equity' and time commitment to the pennies on the other hand doesn't even register... 

check this one out..

i've been working on a lot of things.  mostly my job, which has taken me out of town for several months ans away from the pennies...

back at home most of the time now, and getting back to making the penny tiles for the floor.  came across this one the other night.  thought it was fairly interesting--like it's been used as a buffing wheel or something.  i guess when you handle upwards of 87, 000 of something, you're bound to hit a strange one...

1941...

busy creating the tiles for the floor for the past while...i underestimated how long this was going to take!  besides, work and life tend to be present a lot as well..so there's that for an update so far.

this week, i noticed a penny from 1941--so far, it's the oldest canadian penny i've found in the pile, but there's still lots to go through!  i found an old 1909 american penny too, so i'll have to find a pic of that one.  'til then, it'll have to remain as 'the one that got away' til i can prove it, i guess...   :)

found it!!  it's pretty worn out...but i suppose i would be too if i were a hundred and four...

arbitrary misc.

the oldest canadian penny i have discovered so far is from 1951.  it has an image of king george on the back, as opposed to the more commonly seen profile of queen elizabeth II..seems interesting enough..

long process..

the project is moving along pretty good.  as far as the collection of pennies are concerned, i'm nearly half way to my goal of nearly $900 worth of the copper rounds (yes, i know they're not really made of copper).  most evenings these days, i spend my time meticulously placing pennies in a template i made in order to create a fairly uniform tile...

pennies, you say...

so..recently i've decided to take on the task of covering my studio floor with the nearly obsolete canadian penny.  this year, the canadian mint decided (to all our benefit, imo) that the penny was no longer needed as a valid form of modern currency.  i, on the other hand, have decided quite differently on it's validity.  i will cover my entire studio floor over the coming months with said pennies--and i will need a little more than 87,000 pennies to do this.  for those interested, that's more than 1,750 rolls of the copper units, amounting to somewhere in the neighborhood of $880CAD.

stay tuned, as i march ahead on what i think is going to be a long few months.  i've been collecting them seriously for a few weeks now, and i'm about an eighth the way there.  so, nowhere close...yet.