Long time no post! I've been away for a while for many reasons, but now we're finally getting back into the swing of doing some much needed renovations around our home.
In this thread i'm focusing on the bathroom, and i thought i'd share the first of many bathroom projects we're working on, replacing the bog standard "builder's mirror" that came with our apartment with a shaving cabinet.
But this begs the first of many, many questions...
How do you take a mirror off the wall?
Well you do it with some of these bad boys! About 12 of them to be exact. One of the many, many things I have been getting into while I was away was 3D printing, and well, when you have a hammer, you soon realise everything becomes a nail.
Many of the tutorials i found online for removing mirrors off of drywall / Gyprock call for wood shims, something which whilst I know they probably exist out there (and honestly do the job just nicely), I threw together a design in Fusion 360 (my CAD program of choice) and designed a tapered shim that gently tapers from a 0.5mm tip, up to a 12mm length over as big of a length as my print bed could handle. There's a thicker piece at the end of the shim that gives you a much sharper angle for the latter stages of removal, as well as acting as a nice handy handle for you to get a good grip on them when pushing them in. They're printed from PETG plastic (similar plastic as to what's used in water bottles) with a pretty thick amount of infill.
To get the mirror off the wall, we firstly taped the mirror up as much as we could using some high strength heavy duty masking tape. We used a pair of Trojan two-cup suction handles as well to make it easy to handle the mirror when it eventually pops off the wall. The tape will hold the mirror together if in the event that it does shatter. Some small shards of glass may fly off, so i'd also recommend wearing safety glasses, gloves and closed-in shoes to protect yourself from the potential of flying glass shards.
I would also not do this kind of job alone if the mirror is large, Say larger than 800mm squared. I'd absolutely get a mate or your partner to come in and help.
Mirrors are not made from tempered glass so they will crack if bent too much. However, unlike tempered glass, mirror glass is surprisingly flexible as it's made from annealed glass. It'll bend a lot more than you think it should, but don't go overboard.
We started by putting a shim into a gap that had already begun to form on the upper-right hand edge. If no gap is forming, you could tap your shims in gently using a rubber mallet until you begin to see the mirror flex away from the wall. Then when there's enough clearance to fit another shim in, simply tap one in next to the previous shim. Keep repeating this around the top edge of the mirror, until you can get clearance in either side for more shims.
If you hear popping and cracking noises, kinda like something unsticking? That's a good sign that the adhesive or the paper that holds the mirror to the wall is peeling away. It's okay to lose some wallpaper, you can always re-apply that back to the wall once it's off. Drywall's easily patchable.
Once it's pulled away from the wall enough, you'll really start to hear it making some noise. Make sure one of you two has your hands on the handles. If you can get your hands under the mirror's edge, pull back and forth gently until the mirror pops free.
...and voila! This came off super cleanly with only a few small spots of drywall coming with it.
Patching these tears was a cinch. I took some drywall compound, filled in the gaps and then proceeded to pop on a coat of Dulux One Step Prep in order to, let's be honest, fix up the absolute hashjob the builders did when they put this mirror on the wall in the first place.
Some 80 grit sandpaper, that mentioned filler, and a coat of undercoat later, and it's ready to go for topcoat. We're going with Dulux Wash and Wear Semigloss paint in Miss Universe white to match the rest of the bathroom.
Will post more as we make progress!
