Why You Should NOT Do Epoxy Resin Countertops [Do THIS Instead]

Hi, welcome to The Woods Fans, it's Melissa, and today I'm going to talk to you about my experience with pouring epoxy resin. As a disclaimer on this video, this is just information from my experience, which was not a positive one unfortunately, and you should just take this with a grain of salt. I'm not an expert on this and there probably are a lot of things that I maybe went wrong, so we're going to cover those in this video. First I'm going to touch on how to Second I'm going to touch on what went wrong, and third I'm going to touch on why I don't think that you should apply epoxy resin for your countertop project. Now, while this was my first time applying epoxy resin, I am not an amateur DIYer. I do a lot of DIY. If you follow my channel, then you know that I have worked on a range of materials. Although I don't have a ton of experience with epoxy resin, this tends to be a project that I think a lot of beginner DIYers do take on. They look at their kitchen or they look at their bathroom counters and think, I wish I could update these cheaply, and they see epoxy resin projects that inspire them and think, I can do this, even though they don't have a ton of experience. Well, coming from me, somebody who did do their research and learned how to apply it, I did not think this was an easy DIY. I did not think this was something easy to achieve, like the perfect gloss finish everybody imagines when they do epoxy resin. Let's move on to how to apply epoxy resin. Now, what I would recommend is a flood pour, and this allows you to put so much epoxy resin on your material that you have it just spill over the edges and the whole thing is this perfect glossy finish, since epoxy resin is self-leveling. So the only key thing here is that your actual material is level, and then the epoxy resin can do its magic. I watched an awesome YouTube video that I'll link in the description on this one of nine mistakes that we made when pouring epoxy resin, and it really highlighted some of the most common mistakes, which I agreed with, and it showed me how to avoid them. So the first thing I recommend is building up curbs, and you can see here that I just added some scrap wood underneath my big plastic sheet that I laid down underneath my garage floor to protect the epoxy resin if it floods over the ends. You want the curbs to stop it from getting all over your garage. Epoxy resin is extremely sticky, so it can make a big mess if you don't prepare for that. Another tip I learned from YouTube is to put packaging tape on the underside of your project so that when the edges flood over, they create bubbles on the bottom of epoxy resin, and if you put packaging tape there preemptively, I would actually recommend two layers. I only did one, but if you put packaging tape there before you do the epoxy resin pour, then at the end the packaging tape peels off and all the bubbles of epoxy come with it. This prevents you from having to sand all those bubbles of epoxy down on the bottom of your counterpiece. One thing I learned that is really important that some YouTube tutorials did not show is that it is best to mix your epoxy resin in a low wide container, not something that is like thin and tall. A lot of them mix in a thin and tall, but the problem with that is that you're mixing this steady for like three to five minutes, and I would definitely recommend going on the higher end of that. So you're mixing this for five minutes, and it's going to build up heat if you're in a skinnier container. When you're doing the flood pour, you are going to want to make sure you get the edges really covered, and one woman I watched do an epoxy resin pour, she put it down on the top and then she had gloved hands, and she literally moved it around with her hands instead of allowing the epoxy to just spread out and self level on its own. In that way, she also used her gloved hands to rub epoxy on the edges of her whole piece. Now that's kind of a good technique if you're willing to get that messy, because once epoxy is in a spot, the rest of the epoxy can flow to it easier. And so what I had an issue with is a lot of my edges of a counter, they didn't get fully covered in epoxy, and I used an entire gallon of epoxy between my two coats on my counter. My counter wasn't really that big, and the mathematics of what I figured out I needed, it should have been plenty. So for whatever reason, my edges didn't get fully covered, and they looked kind of bad. They looked kind of bumpy, where the epoxy resin flowed down here, but didn't right next to it. One thing you can do is while your flood pour is slowly moving over all the edges, you can take your paint stick that you use to stir the epoxy in the bucket, and scrape the bottom of your counter to pick up all those drips of epoxy, and then slowly tilt your paint stir over the edge so that the excess epoxy runs down the sides. This allows you to reuse a lot of your epoxy that's just dripping off, and would otherwise be wasted. One thing I heard from my friend Lily Arter, who also writes a wonderful DIY blog, Lily Arter, go check her out. She's done a ton of epoxy resin projects, and her DIY marble epoxy resin bathroom counter actually was what inspired me to take this on from my kitchen island. But she told me that she thinks the carbon dioxide in the blowtorch is what actually pops the bubbles on your epoxy resin pour, because typically you put down the epoxy resin, and then after 10 minutes or so, bubbles arise to the surface, and you go over it with the blowtorch to pop them. And this process can be seen in a lot of different DIY tutorials, but I thought about it, and I was like, if it's just carbon dioxide, I can just use any kind of fire, and maybe just a little lighter will work. Well, it didn't. My first coat of epoxy, a lot of the bubbles didn't get popped from my tiny lighter, so a blowtorch is necessary in applying epoxy resin, and with my second pour, I borrowed a blowtorch from a friend to do that. So now you know the basic tips and tricks on how to apply the epoxy. One of the pieces of advice that I found that really was true about epoxy resin is that the best way to fix any problems that arise when you're trying to apply it is more epoxy resin. So just doing more layers and building up, that is the way you're going to fix soft spots or stippling or any issue you have. So now I want to move to the problems I ran into and the mistakes that happened when I tried to pour my epoxy resin. There are certain temperature requirements, and each epoxy resin is basically a chemical reaction, so they're all going to have different specifications, but in general you need the the temperature outside to be between like 65 and 80 degrees, and you need it to be low humidity, and you also need it to be not windy in like kind of an enclosed area is best. Well, I figured that it would be okay in my garage because I can close the garage door, and it wasn't a windy day, the temperature was perfect, and it wasn't humid when I applied the epoxy resin. However, this was a big mistake. One thing I will say that I learned in my process is that you must apply epoxy resin indoors. It is not enough to have it calm outside because epoxy resin will attract every speck of dust, every little bug, and in Minnesota, believe me, there are a lot of little bugs. And when my first layer of epoxy dried, I was horrified to see the number of bugs and the number of specks of dirt that had gotten into it, considering it was a completely calm day. How I tried to fix the bug problem was just like kind of scooping them out as the epoxy dried, but no matter how many times I did that, 10 more would appear. So it was impossible, and I did end up having numerous bugs completely dry in the epoxy that I then dabbed a little bit of my white paint to kind of make it blend in with the marbling I did, but it was definitely visible, and I was very unhappy about that part. One other major problem that I had when applying my epoxy is that I applied it to a level sheet of plywood, but the plywood itself was the low-grade plywood, so it had variances in the grain, and it wasn't flat. The top wasn't flat, and that is another thing that I thought would not be a problem, because it's a self-leveling product. So if there are areas of the plywood that's lower than another area, the epoxy resin would just level out. I don't know what caused this, but I think it might be the fact that I used a lower grade plywood. When the epoxy resin first poured down, there was a ton of little areas, little circles, where the epoxy resin pulled away, and I called it stippling, but it was like just all these little dots where no epoxy would go there. It was almost like a chemical reaction. I used a water-based latex paint. I couldn't think of any reason why that would have happened. You know, my paint was only 24 hours dry when I put on the epoxy resin, so that could have been it, too. Perhaps you have to wait for your paint to fully cure. I did hear that on one epoxy resin tutorial that I watched after the fact that they said you have to make sure that your paint is totally cured, which means you have to wait two weeks before epoxy resining a paint project. That, I felt like, was a very important detail that a lot of epoxy resin tutorials skipped over, if it's true. Fortunately, the stippling was solved by the second flood pour that I did, and it didn't end up being a huge problem. At this point in the project, these couple issues made me really frustrated, and I decided to move my project indoors. I cleared out a whole bedroom of my house, and I worked on this epoxy resin pour during a time when my kids were out of the way and nobody was going to come in the room, i.e. at night, so I apologize for the crappy video quality. You know, I just had the lights on in there. But yeah, so I brought it inside, I'm working on it inside, and the second pour went a lot better. And at this point, I was like, okay, this is usable. Until I decided to sand. Now, the whole time that I was planning to do epoxy resin, I thought, you know, I want to do epoxy resin because it seems to be a popular choice, and people say it's so durable, but I really hate that high-gloss finish. So what I did was I researched sanding epoxy resin, and from many videos on YouTube, it looked like it was feasible that people sand epoxy resin all the time. So I decided that that was my plan, and when my second quart of epoxy resin was totally dry, I moved the the piece again outside to sand it. And I used my random orbital sander, so that's one of the best sanders you can get as far as not showing marks. So the goal here was that I'm going to take my counter from a high gloss to like a semi-gloss or even more satin finish. Now, I started with like a 200-some grit, then I went to a 320, then I went to a 600 or 400, then an 800. I have clips here of all the different ones I used, but I basically worked my way up, and I sanded this whole thing following a tutorial that I can also link in the description here of people who do epoxy resin all the time, and they sand it to like a honed marble finish. That's what I was going for. It seemed like it was going okay, but eventually my sander started to kind of show like reddish-pinkish areas in the epoxy resin, and I have no idea why. There wasn't sanding residue in my random orbital sander, but I think that the sanding pad itself was like wearing down or like that the epoxy was absorbing the color of the sanding pad that was against it for too long. That weirded me out, so then I kind of stopped sanding before I really got to the point I wanted, and it ended up being kind of sort of like a semi-gloss finish, but not very even. It sure felt soft to the touch, but there were areas because my plywood was uneven that were shinier than others, you know, so that just I really was unhappy about the sanding. What made me even more unhappy was what followed. I used it like this for about a month, and let me tell you, the thing absorbed every stain. Every stain. I couldn't believe it. I was like, wow, I thought this was supposed to be durable. I tried washing it with a rag. I tried picking up stains with a magic eraser. Nothing worked. Nothing. It absorbed stains from really simple things that typically wouldn't stay in a counter, and it absorbed everything. It absorbed carrot slices. Like if I cut up a carrot on it, it would be slightly orange. So by the end of a month, my counter looked horrendous. Like here's a couple shots of it. It was embarrassing. You could see tons of rings where people had set down like a cup of coffee that had some coffee on it, or a cup of juice that had some juice running down the side, and I just couldn't live with it anymore. So in the end, I don't know if it was the sanding that like the specific epoxy resin that I purchased maybe wasn't able to be sanded, and I compromised the composition of the, you know, material of the resin by sanding it and opening up all the pores so that it can absorb stains. That's one of my theories. I have no idea. But in the end, no joke, I primed, repainted, and then polycryliced my counter all over again. And I actually recently just did that this past week. Now the reason that it took me so long to put out this video is because it's been hard for me to come to grips with this being such a big fail, especially since so many people that I know do epoxy resin. Anyway, this video is getting pretty long by this point, and if you're still with me then, I hope that I have highlighted for you some of the reasons you might not want to do epoxy resin. I reached out to a few other bloggers and people I know who've done epoxy resin since having such a struggle with mine and asked them, has yours held up well? Has it stained? A lot of them said it's held up well to water and heat better than they thought. However, almost everyone that I talked to said that it has absorbed some level of stains, even Lily who did it for her bathroom. So I would say that especially if you're going to do epoxy resin over something like a white counter, or like in my case a marble counter, you are going to definitely see stains and it is not worth doing an epoxy resin for. Perhaps the story is different if you're going to be doing it over like stained wood, you know, live edge stuff that had like a lot of variation in the color and interest underneath the epoxy resin that can kind of detract from any stains that the resin absorbs. But sorry to be a Debbie Downer, I just want to be honest with you guys, you know I love to share my DIYs with you, but I would be remiss if I didn't also share my DIY fails. So in this instance, my epoxy resin did not turn out. Here's hoping my polycrylic does. So far so good. And if you want some more information about my journey, just feel free to private message me or comment below because I would be happy to help you with your questions from what I know. Thanks for listening to this long rambling and although my paint job is beautiful, it was heartbreaking to watch it wrecked by a poor epoxy resin job. Hopefully you don't make the same mistake. And we'll catch you next week on Welcome to the Woods. Bye-bye.