Bearded Dragons: Coloring and Sealing the Grout

Now that I'm back from my business trip we restarted work on the terrarium furniture. We used craft acrylics from the local Michael's partially thinned with water to give the rear wall a bit more flair, and even out the coloring of the horizontal surfaces. We succeeded in maintaining the grain of the tile grout.

We have been struggling with what we'll do about sealing the structure, so that it can be cleaned easily and thoroughly when needed. Grout sealers from the hardware store are fairly aggressive stuff and likely don't go well with styrofoam. Thinned, water-resistant wood glue is often used for this purpose, so we gave it a try on the outside walls. It turns out the color darkens quite a bit when covered with glue, but otherwise it works well. Pascal didn't like how much the color darkens, so for now we finished up the outside. The lower edge of the side wall in the photo below has not been painted with glue while the patch in the middle has. The difference in color is quite obvious.

Painting with glue is really cool. At first everything is yellow, and as the glue dries it becomes transparent.