How To Make a Foam Brick Wall from XPS Foam - Complete Guide

Hey, what's up folks, michael here with primal edge, today's video? We are going to be turning foam into bricks, i'm currently working on a backdrop for a set for a podcast, and the idea is to take some XPS foam and turn it into bricks. So i started out by getting a couple of four by eight sheets of the foam, and this is 3/4 inch and i just picked it up over at lowe's, but you can get them at pretty much any of the big-box stores they come in various thicknesses. You don't need to go 2 inches for what we're doing here. It needs to be light, it needs to be mobile, and while foam is just like by nature, I figured we go with 3/4 of an inch because it's not like we're gon na be driving. This thing all over town - it's gon na stay in one place, but it will need to be moved around in the place that it's at. I started out by making a ridiculous mistake that I picked up on a little bit later and that is trying to measure the grid out. Instead, I decided to go outside and get a brick from the backyard, because what better analog for a brick than a brick? So after I corrected from my mistake, I went and got the dremel tool and started to grind out all the grout lines, or rather mortar lines and use the brick again to make sure that I had the spacing in the size as accurate as possible. You know, while I'm thinking about it, if you like this kind of content and you're into this type of thing, consider subscribing to the channel or, at the very least, given me alike, now one thing to keep in mind: the look that's being gone for here is The old rustic, 17th 18th century kind of break the kind you'd see, maybe in an Old English pub or in a colonial building, or something like that uneven irregular sized bricks they weren't made in factories. Like you see today, I wanted the sizes to be different. I wanted them to be slightly off. I one of the grout lines to be off. This is supposed to look like it's been around for a couple of hundred years. Okay, so at this point I took a brass wire brush and you could use pretty much anything. I like brass, because it does give a little bit and it still does put the scratches in I pretty much, went through all the mortar lines and kind of scratched everything down. Then I grabbed whatever white paint I had sitting around mixed it up. I think this is about four years old, but I just wanted to get a good base coat on here to cover the whole thing I didn't care. If I missed a few spots, I was really looking for 95 % coverage. felix furniture website did walk all over crawl. All over and climb all over these bricks intentionally, I figured it's gon na get distressed anyway, so I might as well distress it while I'm working on it and that took care of most of what I needed from a distressing perspective. All the other stuff was done. Just by hitting it knocking it hitting it with a hammer. So at this point I decided it was time to start painting and I was going with a multicolored here. I started out with a cream kind of color and then went through on a bunch of random bricks and hit it with some black now. The way I put this coating on was pretty straightforward. I used an old sponge. I kept it relatively wet, not soaking wet, but just not dry and used that as my paintbrush instead of an actual paint brush, I did have a big brush that I went behind a little later on, as I was painting to kind of get rid of the Obvious sponge marks you'll see me doing that here in a second. You can see that I'm not being careful about making sure I have even coverage. I don't care if I miss a few spots again. This is supposed to be old. Irregular to 300 year old, brick stain soot mark - maybe there maybe there's been some fires around whatever at the end of the day. I wanted this to look old, so you can see me here with a brush where I'd go through with the with the sponge. Like you see right here and then blend everything together, a la bob ross with a dry brush like that, so again, not being too careful with the color. I just wanted to get read all over the bricks. After that was done. I went through with kind of a coffee, caramel kind of white, really really off white, almost beige color and did the grout lines. This paint was watered down substantially that this was about the consistency of milk, maybe even skim milk, and I went through the entire grout lines, as you could see here and drew them in then I went through with a wash. This is where I got really creative. The recipe for the wash is I it's not really exact. I took some black and put it in a Tupperware container, maybe a like a 2 cup cup, a 2 cup Tupperware container. You could see right there. I'D say about a third of: it was filled with paint. There was a drop or two of dish soap and then filled it to the top with water, and essentially I'm going in here to highlight all the accents and the deep dark cracks and scratches. I really want to enforce that that dirt and that grime feeling and this wash, if you're doing any kind of antiquing, really works, fantastic. The kind of paint by the way that I'm using across all of this is just straight up. Walmart craft paint nothing fancy, no $ 50 bottles of paint. The most expensive paint I used was that leftover gallon from when I painted some trim in the other room, and you know that was twenty five dollars and they did all that trim plus. I still got three-quarters of the gallon left over for any other projects and here's the final product. This is only one panel. I'Ve got a couple more that are going to be built. You'Ll see right here the look that I'm going for that really old, antique aged look now stick around and stay subscribe to the channel. If you like this kind of content, there's going to be a few more videos in this series where I build the timber framing for the room as well as go in and do the little details that are really gon na sell this effect. So, stick around stay subscribed and look forward to those remaining videos, thanks for tuning in today guys hope you all have a great day and I'll see you soon.