It is unbelievable to me that in all the “before” pictures, I never took one of the mirror. Close your eyes and imagine a BIG, shiny, reflective, untrimmed mirror held up with little plastic clips.
But what we found behind it was truly the biggest shocker of the whole renovation (besides the old nasty carpet pieces we found):
When we took the mirror off the wall we got quite a surprise: a huge hole that used to house a medicine cabinet.
This was a huge speed bump because we were planning to use Liquid Nails Mirror Adhesive to attach the mirror to the wall. We did have a secondary support system in mind (small nails around the perimeter of the mirror) just for double protection from the mirror falling off the wall. But this huge hole creates that much less space to put the mirror adhesive. Time for some improvising!
Josh ended up patching the hole with some 2×4′s cut to fit in the hole. The other side of the mirror wall is my closet, so we attached the 2x4s with screws from that wall. Surprisingly, I took no pictures of this procedure. I guess since we were winging it, we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best!
The 2×4′s worked quite well. We attached the mirror to the wall using liquid nails for mirrors and left it to set for 3-4 days. While it was setting, we did re-install the ugly mirror clips to have “extra” protection from the mirror crashing off the wall. Also the mirror was not centered to the wall, or to the vanity (complete head scratcher to us too). Only thing we can think is they went for the studs and centered the clips in the studs to the mirror. We ended up centering the mirror to the wall. If you REALLY look at it, it feels weird that it’s not centered to the vanity top, but the trim wouldn’t have fit on the right side if we centered the mirror to the vanity top. Since there are no before pictures, you are just going to have to go by my word!
We also nailed some finishing nails around the perimeter of the mirror which would be the permanent secondary support system that the trim would cover. As we held our breath, and simultaneously crossed our fingers- we unscrewed the mirror clips and hoped for the best. Thankfully there was no mirror crashing down incident! The mirror held and it was time for trim!
Tidus, a dog we gave away earlier last year had chewed some trim in the laundry room:
This trim needed to be replaced ASAP so we used the top of the chewed trim as the side pieces around the mirror.
We measured, cut, and nailed the new trim in place. <—– makes the whole process seem painless, but in reality 2 drill bits bit the dust, I chipped the mirror (to the tune of a small crack- that magically disappeared 2 hours later…. still not sure what to think about that), and spilled brown paint on a white rug while touching up the vanity… all in a matter of 10 minutes. Frustrated is too small a word to use for how I felt. But with the magicallydisappearingmirrorcrack a few hours later, things improved tremendously and we were able to finish.
Loving this new mirror trim- but during the whole process I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about tearing the whole thing down and buying an already trimmed mirror! 
All’s well that ends well.
All’s well that ends well.
I am painfully behind on painting as you can see in the pictures. The bottom half is completely done (trim and all) but up by the ceiling is just slow going. Plus painting paneling is a pain! <— holy alliteration.
Stay tuned for post 5 that will show how much it all cost! We came in under $200- just for a spoiler.
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