Mirror, Mirror off the Wall

The space in the new house that we decided to use as an office is the room above, formerly a workout room. When we moved in, the two mirrors here: a full length mirror and a huge 6 foot X 4 foot mirror, were here. Both glued to the wall. Pedro and I both set up our desks in here. Mine is now in the right corner that you see above, so I can look out the window. Pedro has moved his desk four times, trying to get things right.

His first choice was to do what I did, and put his desk into the left corner, also looking out the window. But the mirrors are a problem. He has multiple meetings each day and the mirrors were interfering, with reflections and distortion in all directions. It has been his goal since the day we moved in, to get rid of that big wall mirror.

Finally, it was time. He unscrewed the little claws screwed around the outside of the mirror, and gave it a tug. Stuck. He found some flat wall spackling tools and wedged them under the mirror and tugged again. Stuck. He pried and pulled – always gently – without luck.

On a whim, I checked YouTube. You DO know that a video for absolutely every home DIY question under the sun exists? I typed in: “how to remove a mirror from a wall” and up popped a detailed instructional video for how to safely remove a large mirror that has been glued to a wall. Exactly what we needed. And a lifesaver! We never would have thought of this method before seeing the video and may never have retrieved it intact on our own. The person making the video said to gently hammer in wooden shims all around. Then hammer in more, and more, stacking them.

We confidently began in the morning. “How much glue could there be?” we asked ourselves. Pedro put on gloves to catch falling glass. I pulled a small step ladder close, and gently hammered in shims. Tap, tap here, tap, tap there. I began just at the top. When there was no progress, I began tapping them in at the sides. When that didn’t do anything, I began tapping from the bottom.

The guy in the video stressed that we should wait every now and then, and give the pressure time to work itself through. We went very slowly. It was tense for me as well as for Pedro, who remained poised with hands beneath the mirror the entire time. After a couple of hours, we had to take a break. That’s when I took the photo above.

We ate lunch, ran some errands and then went back to it.

After a couple more hours of tapping in shims, I got a little reckless. We were learning the audible signs of it working. You can actually hear the stress creaks and pops as the mirror pulls away from the wall. When that happens, the guy in the video said, stop what you are doing and wait for the pressure to subside. So I was waiting. We were so used to the mirror not coming off the wall that I sort of expected it to never come off the wall. I had my back to it, messing with something. Pedro was talking to me about something, but by luck remained facing the wall with his gloved hands out. And POP!

I whirled around and put my hand against the glass to press it to the wall, and keep it from tipping out. There was Pedro with the mirror resting on his knees.

The mirror had been glued to the wall as though lives depended on it. For anyone preparing to install your own large wall mirror, this amount of glue is NOT necessary. A mirror can be safely mounted with strategically placed dots of glue here and there. The removal took paint and chunks of sheetrock with it, as you see here.

The other thing we did not like about our office was that it was painted dark grey. Likely because one full wall was chalkboard paint, and the other walls matched the chalkboard. Probably cool and fun and convenient if this was your workout room, but it just looked messy as our office. So we would repaint it. First, we had to repair it.

On the third day we felt it was ready for paint. Our goal was to not purchase any paint. In our garage, we had inherited about 17 cans of house paint of various shades. Six of them were mostly empty, so we had disposed of them. Of the remaining cans, I chose all the whitish ones and lighter colours, and painted samples onto a scrap of cardboard. We used that to match to other walls in the house and thus eliminated paint that matched other rooms in the house we might want to use for patches later. There was one very old gallon of a creamy white that we couldn’t match anywhere. It took me two days of effort, but I finally stirred it enough to blend the separating colours and textures and weights of the fluids inside. I used that as a base paint, to brighten up that dark grey.

Next it was time for colour. I used the remainder of the cream paint, the entirety of what remained of a can of light blue paint that we couldn’t find a match to anywhere in the house. Then I added in another shade of white paint to make a full gallon. I mixed and mixed and mixed, then began with a colour we called Simpson’s sky blue.

First, I contacted Kellen’s old ballet studio and offered up the mirror for free to any dancers or to the studio, if anyone wanted it. There were no takers. I put the mirror on facebook marketplace for free, hoping against hope that someone, somewhere might want a giant mirror and take it off our hands. We were BOMBARDED with interest! No less than 25 people asked for the mirror, and I said whomever gets here first gets it. The mirror was gone by 6am the next morning. We had placed it against the side of the house. When we woke up it was gone, and a very happy person had sent a message to me on facebook: thank you thank you!

The colour is beautiful and lifts my spirits. It’s not exactly the colour that looks best with our decor. But it still looks good and it was completely free. Pedro finally got to hang his guitars and get them off the floor.

In case you wonder what our life looks like MOST of the time, it’s this. In the photo above, Pedro works from home with three gigantic monitors to manage his job as a Data Scientist in the research division for a digital medical data company. There’s Racecar the cat, almost undetectable, curled up in her new favourite thing in the entire world: a heated fuzzy cat bed. The paper shredder is placed beside the chest of drawers (unplugged) because she is too old to jump up there unassisted any longer. The window gives us a view of the busy busy street in front of our house, with cars zooming by, occasional sirens from the nearby fire station, lots of joggers and walkers, and in the mornings and in the afternoons, kids walking to and from school. It’s nothing at all like my home in Rainier, when one car an hour might pass by, and one walker or cyclist a week.