Shane Moseley joined his father’s construction company in 1999 and 10 years later started his own business, Custom Home Updates, in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. He managed to get his company listed on Angie’s List and received plenty of good reviews, which led to bookings months in advance, primarily for kitchen, bath and countertop work.
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A couple of years ago he discovered Ambient Glow Technology, a line of nontoxic, glow-in-the-dark products from Universal One Corp. in Canada. “It comes in safety yellow (which looks green), sky blue, aqua and purple and in the form of powder, sand, larger granules and up to river-rock sized stones,” Moseley says. The first project he did with this material, using 3/4-inch gravel, was a driveway. “You can mix the powder in sealer or sprinkle it on top while it’s wet and at night it looks radioactive. It looks like you’re walking on a bed of stars.”
In May 2015, Moseley created these countertops for a woman who originally was set on white marble for her home office. After researching techniques and practicing, he dipped a feather in gray concrete paint and twirled it to get natural-looking marble veins. He used countertop forms by Concrete Countertop Solutions and mixed the sky-blue, glow-in-the-dark powder into a CCS water-based penetrating sealer called Z SiAcryl 14. The homeowner initially thought the countertops weren’t shiny enough, so Moseley went back and applied three more coats of the gloss sealer.
The powdered sugar-like product is available for a little more than $100 per pound, and Moseley needed only 1/4 pound to achieve this long-lasting glow effect. “It really looks like marble during the day but after it’s been charging in the sunlight or in a well-lit room with fluorescent lights, it just shines and it lasts for 10 hours,” he says. “I also did a shower surround using the bigger granules embedded during the making of a client’s cultured marble shower panels and it looks like you’re taking a shower in outer space. Now that people have seen me use this product a few times, people get really excited about the possibilities because it stays lit up for so long.”
www.customhomeupdates.com
