Day 16 - My 2 Day Mirror Project

I am going to start with - FINALLY, this project is done!!  What I thought would take a few hours (who was I kidding?) ended up taking me 2 days.  You have probably seen these Ikea mirrors before - mine are painted from when we lived in our old house - but they originally came in raw wood form.  

These have been laying in a pile under my guest bed for five years because they were kind of modern looking and I wasn't really sure what to do with them.  I decided that now was as good a time as any, and decided to paint them white.  My initial thought was to glue them all together and make one big piece, but I ran into some issues:
1.  Our wood clamps weren't long enough, so the glue wouldn't hold.  I am a pretty patient person, but holding together mirrors while the glue dried wasn't my cup of tea.
2.  I pushed them all together to see what one big mirror would look like and realized that one was about 1/16th of an inch smaller than the rest, and one was about 1/16th larger than the rest.


I decided to just start painting and figure it out later.  So all of the mirrors got 2 coats of white semigloss paint.  

They dried overnight, so this morning I got to work sanding and distressing them.  Because they were already a dark brown underneath, I just ran some sandpaper over the outer and inner edges to make them look as if they had naturally worn over time.

I'm going to derail for a moment.  So yesterday I decided that I wanted to go buy a few decorative wood pieces to add to some of the mirrors.  I went online and found that Hobby Lobby carried them.  So, after picking Addie up from school we drove there.  Now, when I enter that store it is as if time stops.  I manage to go down aisles that I have no business being in, and stand there and visualize how I need everything in it.  Needless to say, my quick 5 minute trip turned into an hour in the store.  THEN, when I got to the check out line - 40% off coupon in hand - I reached into my purse to get my wallet and NO DICE.  Left it at home.  Jeez.  So THEN we proceeded to go all the way home, BACK to Hobby Lobby, and finally managed to return home two and a half hours after I had originally left.  Don't you love when that happens?  :o)


OK - back to my project.  So I got the wood pieces - I decided on Fleur de Lis.  I wanted them to have the same distressed look, but had no black paint.  I needed to get creative so I colored them with black sharpie, painted them white and distressed them the same way I did the mirrors.  Then, with wood glue, I just glued 4 of them to 4 of the mirrors.

Finally, all that was left was to figure out how to hang them.  The backs of the mirrors have nothing, and I couldn't manage to locate any of my frame kits.  Once again I had to get creative.  I ran up to my craft room (because I decided to work in my kitchen and mess it up instead), and found some scraps of leather cording I had.  Then I cut 9 pieces the same length, looped them and hot glued them to the back.

Then all that was left was to hang them!!  Here's the final result:

I hung them in my dining room over our buffet, but I still have to figure out how I want to decorate the top of the buffet.  For now, I used the stained glass lamps that my dad made me.  


Yay!  Mission accomplished!!


Till tomorrow,


 - Jenn

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