I showed you my vamped up entrance hall yesterday:
It’s reeeeaalllly hard to get a good picture of a mirror!?! So apologies for the crap-ball pictures to follow.
I knew I wanted a large mirror for that wall….to open up the space and make the small area feel larger. But I didn’t want to spend a fortune on one, nor did I want to rip up the wall trying to hang a heavy mirror big enough to fill it. *that’s what she said* (Seriously, it’s like turrets!) I also like to create original things when possible. Here was my inspiration:
House Beautiful
The answer was Ikea.
LOTS tiles — pack of 4 for $10 (website says $5, but they were $10 in my store.) They are each a square foot.
First I blocked off the wall with painters tape in 12″ increments until I was happy with the size.
My mirror is 3′ x 5′, so I needed 15 mirror tiles. They come with self-adhesive tabs you apply to each corner:
I used a level to mark my top and side placement right (really, nothing would drive me battier than a wonk-eyed mirror!), and started in the top left corner. And I don’t know what Ikea puts on those adhesive tabs, but Moses could not pry them off the wall within a second after placement! You could seriously plug the holes in the Titanic with these things. This is what it looked like when I got all of them up:
Again, hard to take a pic of a mirror. But without a frame, the edges were undefined and it looked like I tacked mirrors on the wall. (Well, I did, but didn’t want it to look like that!) I decided to trim it with a 1/2″ thick twisted rope (this project required 5 1/2 yards, I found it in the Trim section at JoAnns Fabric).
Using Fabri–Tac glue, I started in the bottom right corner and applied a thin layer of glue to the edge of the mirror. I put a piece of painters tape every foot or so, just to reinforce the rope until the glue dried.
The trim helped to anchor the mirror and give it more definition on the wall. Next was creating the little bit of ‘pizz-azz’ by placing decorative nails (in the nailhead trim section) at the intersecting seams. If I’d followed the directions on the Ikea mirror, I would have left a sliver of space between each tile, thus giving me room to push in the nail. Since my tiles are pressed so tightly together, Mr. Sugarplum cut the stick part off the back of each nail, and I just glued them directly on the mirror.
It adds a nice finishing touch. I couldn’t get a good close up of the nail, but it’s distressed brass.
So there it is…easy breezy! I have a fear of my DIYs coming out like a 7th grade craft project….so what do you think?
UPDATE: The mirror got another upgrade…check it out here.
