Like most cookie-cutter plaster-of-paris houses in America, our bathroom mirrors had no frills. Just a reflective piece of glass on the wall to provide basic functionality and that’s it. To make your bathroom look a bit fancier on the cheap and really easily, you’ll need the following:
- Low temp hot glue gun and glue
- Bathroom caulk
- Primed polystyrene (foam) Window/Door Casing (Enough to cover the perimeter of each mirror )
- Four Primed Rosettes
- Fine toothed saw of some kind (I highly recommend a miter box and a pull saw) The material is really easy to cut, but you want a nice clean straight edge that might be tough to achieve with a razor.
We’re getting primed moulding and rosettes because white works well with our bathroom colors and I’m lazy and don’t want to have to paint anything.
The first step is to measure out your cuts for the casing or moulding. This is actually kind of hard to do because we are going to have a rosette in each corner of the mirror. I tried an elaborate method of calculating this at first but ended up just having to go with the flow as things didn’t turn out how I expected at first. Start with the rosettes. These will be in the corners of the mirror and what we want is to maximize mirror space. We don’t want to cover the mirror any more than we need to, so let’s say 1/2 of the casing thickness will cover the mirror. The casing and rosettes are the same thickness, so if we do 1/2 the thickness from the side, and 1/2 the thickness from the bottom, only 1/4 of the area of the rosette will actually be covering the mirror. Pretty complicated to read but easy to see.
Now to attach these pieces we will have to use a two-step solution. We’ll apply both silicone caulk and low temp hot glue. The reason for this is that the hot glue by itself falls off after about a day or two (ask me how I know). The caulk will hold it great, however it doesn’t have enough tack force to hold the pieces in place long enough to dry when you apply it. So we’ll use the silicone caulk for long term stickitude, and the low-temp hot glue just to hold it on the glass until the caulk can set. Voila’.
Warning: I used hot glue with no problem, and I used low temp hot glue. I don’t know what kind of hot glue gun you are using, or how your glass will react. If you shatter your bathroom mirror due to thermal stress it can be dangerous and will be totally your own fault. Do this at your own (slight) risk. If you are worried about how hot the glue is, then just apply it to the rosette and let it cool for a bit before applying it to the glass.
Put the rosette in the corner, and make sure to align it straight. You really only get one shot to stick it to the glass with the hot glue. If you get it wrong you’ll just have to pull it off, clean the glass and back of the rosette and try again. Once the hot glue touches the cools glass it nearly instantly sticks. After doing this a couple of times we got the hang of it. Again, use caution pulling this off the mirror if you need to because doing it wrong could break the corner of the mirror. It isn’t a huge worry, but just be careful.
Once you have the rosettes in the corners you can cut your moulding pieces to length. In our case I measured roughly and cut the casing, then wedged it in place and tweaked the cuts if I needed to. This was also a time when I realized that some of the rosettes were misaligned and I redid them yet again.
When applying the casing, you have to make one long line of hot glue and make it as straight as possible. This is on the back side of the moulding, however due to the thickness of the glass it can be seen. Also, once this foam material is on the mirror, you won’t easily get it off immediately without snapping it in half.
Once you get all the pieces on the mirror, caulk the connections between the casing the rosettes to complete the look.
I’m really overcomplicating the project. It was super easy and looks great with no painting required.
Midway and After shots of Mirror 1. You can see the transformation even in the first pic.
A simpler method is to find an old frame and paint it white and hang it. Check out what Jess did here:
