Mirror, mirror on the wall? Why are you the ugliest of all?

For as long as I lived there, the vanity mirrors in the two bathrooms of my previous home irritated me. Practically speaking they served their purpose, but aesthetically? Not so much.

The mirrors were the large, frameless cheap kind that builders hang when they are unimaginative, budget-minded or both. The one in the girls’ bathroom measured approximately 4’x 3’ tall. The one in the master bath was even larger, about 6’x3’. Tacky metal mirror clips held them in place.

Since fixing the problem became somewhat of an obsession, i went on the Internets trying to find easy and inexpensive solutions. I didn’t want to invest a lot of money in the project because we were trying to sell the house, but in the meantime I had to live there and look at the monstrosities. (Or, rather, look at myself through one of these monstrosities.) Of course, I could have removed them altogether and hang smaller framed mirrors, but I couldn’t find any I really liked. Proportionally speaking, if I were to buy new, it’d need to be fairly large to look decent.

So imagine my delight when I came across this framed mirror tutorial. The author is a woman named Sausha, a creative gal who owns a furniture refinishing business in Utah called Sweet Pickins. While she is far more handy and creative than I, she came up with a simple solution to making over ugly vanity mirrors that even the DIY-challenged like me can pull off. She used inexpensive baseboard and chair rail molding to frame out the mirrors, glued it on and did her cool distressed painting application.

Anyone else have such a design/décor dilemma? Let me know what you did to fix it. And if you have any other suggestions, I’m all ears.