HGTV's Scott McGillivray Shares His One-Of-A-Kind Flooring Design

HGTV star and investor, Scott McGillivray has made a name for himself for turning properties into money. It's not all that surprising, then, that one of the stand-out features of his own home in Toronto is made of cash. We're talking about the penny floor in his home office. 

While not exactly commonplace, it's worth noting that penny flooring has become increasingly popular over the last few years. You may have spotted it in trendy restaurants — and several content creators have taken to YouTube to show how to do it yourself. Even with the growing popularity, however, this is a trend almost guaranteed to have unique elements to it. For starters, depending on how long a coin has been in circulation, its color may be lighter or darker. That makes the design varied and customizable. 

Even so, McGillivray took personalization to yet another level in his home office floor design. Far from being content with checkerboard prints, or even art deco-inspired designs, the "Scott's Vacation House Rules" star used pennies to create something meaningful to him while paying homage to his career. All it took was a whopping 26,000 pennies — and about as many questions. As he joked in an insert with Cityline, "If I had a penny for every time somebody asked me how I did this floor, I'd be able to do it again." So, how did he do it the first time?

The apple doesn't fall from far from the tree in the McGillivray household. As the real estate expert revealed on his website, he first thought of a penny floor when one of his daughters asked to put part of her piggy bank stash into the house. That, she'd end up doing quite literally. However, if using a portion of his daughters' pennies wasn't sentimental enough, the investor took things a step further by using them to create a map design of Canada and the USA — the two places he lived and ran businesses. 

Then, came the work. McGillivray laid down a mat, sketched out a map, and then placed the pennies — all 26,000 of them. Ironically, that was still the easy part. "Once the map was complete we used a sticky pad to lift the pennies up and epoxied underneath. Then we put the pennies back down, removed the sticky pad, and epoxied over top," he explained on his blog. Given just how painstaking the process was, McGillivray added that even with the low cost of the pennies themselves, the work and hours that went into it made up for that.

If you want to mimic the idea without the month-long process, there are copper mosaic tile options available on Amazon. However, this is one feature you may want to see as a labor of love. McGillivray certainly did — and today, he's got a unique feature in his office, packed with personal meaning.