7 Years of Bad Luck

The guest room and guest bathroom are getting a makeover this week. We're not doing a full gut of the bathroom by any means but I am refreshing the towel bars, toilet paper holder, and mirror to give it a less builder basic look. 

When  I was first looking at the mirror I found it had these spring clips at the top.

They seemed simple enough, just lift them up to release the mirror and it should come right out. Should....that's what I thought so I didn't think anymore about it until it was time to paint the bathroom and the mirror needed to come down.

I could not get the mirror to budge out of the clips at all. So...I did some googling and found it was most likely both glued and clipped into place. The options were to try to slowly shim it free and still have a good chance of it breaking, or to just break it.

Is it still 7 years of bad luck if you intentionally break a mirror?

I texted Derrick to both make sure it was OK with him that I went ahead and destroyed it and to also make sure he knew what I was doing in case I called him later and needed to go to the E.R. Also, if he felt the need to be home when I was attempting this I wanted to give him that chance. He trusts me and gave me the go ahead with the promise that I'd text him when I was done!

There aren't a lot of google sources for breaking a mirror safely so I watched a few videos and pieced together my plan.

First I taped the mirror. The idea here is to keep the glass from flying everywhere after it's shattered. In hind sight, I'd probably tape it even more than this next time.

Then I changed into full sweats, closed toes shoes, and gloves.

Hood up, goggles on, I was ready!

Then I took my hammer, turned my head away, and smashed my hammer into the middle of the mirror where the tape overlapped.

Nothing happened. It was just loud, no shatter. I hit the mirror 8 times before it broke! On the eighth time I really hit it as hard as I could. I thought I was hitting it hard before but I totally underestimated how hard I was going to have to whack it to break it. You really have to get some muscle behind it.

In the end, it worked!

I have a few tips in hind sight.

1. Lay a cloth or drop cloth down under the mirror to make picking up the glass shards easier and to also protect your sink. I think our sink is OK but it also has a few new marks on the edges.
2. Close the floor vents in the room...I thought I had but I hadn't and I'm sure some glass went down the vent.
3. Close your sink drain. I thankfully thought ahead and did that.
4. Have your vacuum close by and ready. I had to carefully slip out of my shoes, get the vacuum, and come back and put my shoes back on to clean it all up.

Also, don't take your sweatsuit off until after the mirror is totally down. I did not do this. Thankfully I came away cut free but I was wishing I had my suit on. The mirror stayed standing in the clips and once I removed those big pieces in the clips the whole thing came shattering down everywhere. That was a little scary. Luckily I could tell it was going to happen so positioned myself and was prepared but it was so loud and glass flew everywhere. Goggles are key and I left those on even through the vacuuming.

Here is a closer look at those bottom clips. Helpful that the screw is UNDER the mirror.....NOT! I suppose if it hadn't been glued the clips would have been a good idea.

For the glass, I ended up taping up all the seams in a cardboard box and dumping the shards in there. You can see that there were still some pretty big pieces to deal with but there were also so many tiny little slivers. I vacuumed for a good 20 minutes and the bathroom is really tiny. I vacuumed out the sink, the tub, in all the individual grout lines of the floor, and I went over the whole floor several times. Then I used hands to go over the floor again to find any stray pieces and then I vacuumed again. I've been in there barefoot painting it today and haven't picked up any glass so I think we're good!

You can see where it was glued and took some drywall with it. Those had to get spackled and sanded before painting.

This was a fun one! Kind of scary but a little bit of an adrenaline rush and I'm so excited to get the builder mirror off the wall with no chance of return! Now I need to find the perfect replacement! The guest room itself turned a corner today too and is looking good. There is still a super long way to go but I'm excited!