There will always be aspects of your home that you can’t stand to look at — ugly fixtures put in before you lived there, a terrible wallpaper on the kitchen walls, or something horrendous of the like. In some cases there’s nothing you can do remedy these eye sores, but sometimes we manage to find clever DIYs to fix the most unpleasant home decor.

For example, this ingenious woman was thoroughly displeased with her ugly kitchen floor. All the floor was? Two bare pieces of wood, which made the house look almost abandoned.

Instead of going for a more typical floor renovation (with finished wood or tiles, for example) she decided to figure out a more creative way to fix her unfortunate floor. She decided to do something truly out-of-the-box, but the risk really paid off! The end result is extremely cool and reflects her own unique personality, which is what home decor is for.

So what exactly did she do to create a standout floor? She used an unusual material: pennies.

And lucky for us, she used Imgur to document the entire project from start to finish!

After going to the bank and withdrawing $150 worth of pennies, she separated the coins into a dingy pile and shiny pile. She did this so she could create a color-contrasting pattern on the floor, which is just brilliant.

To lay out all the pennies, she used Elmer’s glue, grout, and epoxy. Besides the pennies, these are the only materials she used!

She started by measuring out the space, and creating a grid to work on that she would lay out over the entire floor. Then, she started laying out pennies by working from the center of the grid outward in a diamond pattern.

The contrasting pennies were used in one main pattern that takes up most of the floor, alternating diamonds of shiny pennies and tarnished pennies. This simple but elegant pattern that takes its cues from the look of old-fashioned hardwood parquet, which used contrasting colors of wood.

When she discovered she wouldn’t have enough dark or tarnished pennies to complete the pattern, she hit a bit of a road block. Instead of giving up, she improvised and ended up dying a few of the shinier pennies with liver of sulfur, a gel which gives metal a blue-black patina.