I don't know what's more impressive, that Ronda Batchelor is a stay-at-home mother of six, or that she's got some serious finishing skills. When looking into a marble countertop for her home, she was discouraged by the prices:

For Carrara marble it would have cost $650 and for another light colored marble it was going to cost $530! So, I thought I would just put in laminate that looked like marble. I got quotes for $214 and $288 not including installation!! Then I searched and found a guy who would build it on site for $150!

Before going with the $150 option, Batchelor figured she'd give some faux marbling techniques she'd seen online (links at the bottom of this entry) a try. Thus she started with a crappy, run-of-the-mill particle-board core $5 countertop.

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Having cutting it to fit her space, she gave the faux marble treatment to the cut-offs as a test:

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Pleased with the results, she started working the real piece. These are the tools she used:

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The counter came out looking pretty good, though she feels she overdid the veining in the center:

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The next problem was to get the texture correct. To get that polished marble look and gloss over the paint marks, she mixed up resin for the top:

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Here's the crazy part. If you've ever seen epoxy applied to bar counters and the like, you know that the stuff tends to bubble. Those bubbles have to be popped with a propane torch or they'll ruin the finish as they cure in place. But Batchelor couldn't get her torch working--so she and her mother used their lungs, blowing the bubbles out.

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After the three-day curing was complete, the results were pretty stunning:

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"I may have gone overboard [with the amount of] close up photos below," Batchelor writes. "Before I started I wanted to see details and close up shots of other blogger's counters but I couldn't find many. So I want you to have that advantage, plus I think it's so pretty."

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Batchelor cites this post and that post as sparking her inspiration to try the technique.