The Mirror Wall

Although I'm not writing these posts in chronological order, one of the most major transformations in our house was the removal of the mirror wall.  When we bought the house, the living room contained a wall of full length, floor to ceiling mirrors.

We first tried to condition our offer on the old owners removing the mirrors, which they of course rejected.  We then had a contractor take a look at the mirrors and he thought it was possible for us to remove them ourselves.  We clearly had no idea what we were doing but thought to give it a shot anyway.

The day we closed, we took a crow bar and literally smashed it against the first mirror pane.  The thing didn't even shake, let alone crack.  It took several more whacks until we finally got it to splinter.  Although we tried taping the mirror to prevent it from breaking into a million pieces but we soon learned that the tape was more of a hinderance.

After a few hours, we had removed most of the mirror off of the walls.  The good news was that the dry wall behind it was fully intact as we found out that the mirror was secured to the wall with large wooden pillars which were screwed into the wall and tarred onto the mirror.  The bad news is that we now had large and small jagged pieces of broken glass and no way to discard it.  We called 1-800 Got Junk which had no problem hauling away a thousand pieces of broken glass.

We were left with a purple wall with long wooden pillars screwed into it.  It took us sometime to finish removing all of the pillars.  Mostly in part because some of the screws holding it down were stripped and hard to remove.  The other road block was that some genius tarred the mirror directly over the screws so we had to get through hardened tar to get to the screw.  I guess whoever put the mirrors up didn't think someone would want to take them down.  Of course while we were dealing with this, there were tiny shreds of broken glass that we constantly had to watch for.

When we finally removed all of the pillars and patched the holes, we had to sand and paint. With the wall re-painted and the mirrors removed, the wall looked like this:

It's not the greatest shot in the world, but you get the picture.  The paint color is Natural Wicker by Glidden.  The wall is now in need of some wall art.