Mirror

Back, back, way back, when my elder son still liked me, he made me a custom bathroom mirror. Well, he didn't actually make the mirror, but he was into glass etching at the time and did his voodoo to a store-bought mirror to customize it for me. I covet this mirror, for obvious reasons.

When we were pulling everything out of the bathroom to prepare it for its makeover, the corner of the mirror broke. Gah!

I was horrified! It was nobody's fault, but there was no way I was going to let this mirror get away with trying to commit suicide!! Since it also had age spots in some places...

...I decided there was no better time to update it with a beautiful frame. Initially I thought I might use the same material as the baseboards, but once I held it up there I decided it was boring. Plus, it was too wide. So off to Lowe's I went, and picked out some groovy molding. Going with the pond/garden theme, I chose this:

I carefully measured and cut the pieces with my miter saw. This was a bit of a challenge to get just right because the mirror didn't sit flush with the wall on the left, and I absolutely HAD to make sure the frame covered the broken bit.

Here's everything dry-fitted together. You can see I already painted the trip white. Then I decided that was boring.

So I took the pieces out back and spray painted everything brushed nickel to match the rest of the hardware installed in that bathroom.

I laid all the pieces upside-down on my kitchen counter. I placed pieces of waxed paper under the joints to protect the counter and shimmed everything level with Popsicle sticks placed diagonally under the corners. Then I gorilla-glued all the joints. I had to holding everything in place with painter's tape and soup cans. It worked great, but like all DIY miters, there were still tiny gaps so I mixed a tiny bit of water into a tiny bit of wood filler and used a tiny paintbrush to finesse the joints. Once everything was dry and perfect, I re-sprayed the joints so now it looks like I knew what I was doing. LOL.

Online tutorials said to clue the frame to the mirror, but this didn't make sense to me. The mirror is fixed to the wall with small metal brackets, preventing the frame from sitting flush with the glass. So I ransacked my sewing kit, cut small pieces of stick-on Velcro, and stuck those on the brackets. Then I used red lipstick to draw a line down the center of each of those, and then held the assembled frame up to all that and pressed lightly. This left a red lipstick mark on the back side of the frame, showing me exactly where to stick the other side of the Velcro strips. Got those stuck on and, voila!

I planned to put a picture hanger thingy on the top-center of the frame and hang it like a picture in front of the mirror, but it doesn't seem this will be necessary. It's been a few hours and the Velcro is holding strong. Woot!

Post Script: Here's a shot from the Lowe's website of the shades I used on my pendant lights. They are actually much more white than this. They look like white fish scales.