<p>It was a good thing that I decided to turn on the lights in the bedroom before dashing into the darkness of the master bathroom when I came home tonight, ot I would be posting this from the ER! The gynormous wall mirror that was glued to the wall in our master bath decided to get unglued, fell off the wall and crashed onto the tiled counter and floor, shattering into pieces of various sizes! I count my lucky stars that I did not step on any shards of glass, because I was barefoot! I also thank my fortune that I was not in the bathroom when it happened. :eek:</p>
<p>I took some pictures of the disaster, emailed them to my hubby (who is visiting his dad), and poured myself a glass of what turned out to be a really yucky wine. It was a grand finale of my busy work week! Now it sounds that my weekend calendar is already full. Yipee - a bathroom remodel project. Needless to say, hubby was not thrilled. </p>
<p>Got any tips on bathroom mirror designs? Any stories about disasters of similar proportions, anyone?</p>
<p>I was doing a treatment on a horse-hair plaster ceiling that involves painting the ceiling, embedding a thin fiberglass cloth in the paint, and then painting over it to seal the cloth into the paint.</p>
<p>Well, apparently I didn’t use enough paint, because when I was about half-way done, all of the cloth unpeeled itself and came down on top of my head. Leaving me covered in paint. And covering everything else in paint, too. What a mess.</p>
<p>We never use glue - trust me. The mirror came with the house. As is. Apparently, that was the contractor’s SOP. </p>
<p>I’m sure DH wil bolt the replacement to the wall with the same hardware that he used to anchor the deck to the house :D. He always does. In his opinion, even a tiny picture that can be attached to a wall with a piece of Scotchtape has to be bolted to a stud or else Drywall anchors do not do it for him. Every bookcase in the house has to be earthquake-proofed.</p>
<p>Yikes about your project. At least I was not there when my disaster happened!</p>
<p>This isn’t a mirror issue but when I was a little kid my grandparents had a wobbly ceiling fan on their patio. One day, when I was out in the patio (standing a few feet away from it), it wobbled itself loose and came crashing down! The glass from the light on it shattered in a million pieces. </p>
<p>To this day (well over 20 years later) I won’t walk under a ceiling fan. Call me paranoid but that thing could have killed me!! My boyfriend told me he’s going to install them in every room of my house! :(</p>
<p>I wish you luck with that!! We own separate houses and the other month he told me he wanted to put one in the master bedroom at his house. I told him if I came home to that house to a ceiling fan in the bedroom I was going to sleep in the guest room. Lol. So what did he do? Installed a ceiling fan in his guest room. Smart man. ;)</p>
<p>I have a plain mirror against the wall (not sure how it’s attached but I think there are little clips) and there are a row of 5 or 6 large lights above it.</p>
<p>I just took down a couple of very large bathroom mirrors glued to the wall that had bene in place for 30 years. They were really stuck to the wall but I managed to get them each off in one piece. </p>
<p>The problem is that the glue can become very hard and brittle/crumbly and it’s really only stuck to the paper of the drywall in the first place. I agree that a mechanical fastening is best and is safest. In one of the big mirrors I fastened a couple of simple blocks unobtrusively near the top to block the mirror (floor to ceiling) from possibly tipping out in the event the glue failed. I ended up breaking up the mirrors so I could throw them out. They’re unbelievably tough to break. For the most part I just cut them into smaller pieces with a glass cutter.</p>
<p>We had a glass shower door break all by itself once in the middle of the night or day when no one was around. It shattered in a zillion pieces but at least, unlike the mirrors, it was safety glass so it broke in the blocks like a car window. The glass place said they just do that, shatter by themselves years after being installed, every now and then.</p>
<p>ucsd<em>ucla</em>dad, are you saying that I have more broken glass to look forward to? Oh, my! I’d better get a head start and replace the shower glass wall as well :)</p>
<p>Hubby is going to love this! Projects galore! I actually loathed that mirror. It looked cheap compared to the rest of the bathroom design, but I was not going to bring up the subject with DH because I knew that it would require massive work to replace it. Now… Ding-dong, the wicked witch is gone! I decided to wait until tomorrow to do the cleanup. It will take me at least an hour to deal with the fallout.</p>
<p>Be very careful cleaning up - those little shards fly everywhere. After sweeping up what you can a shop vac comes in handy for getting pieces you can’t see but your bare foot will manage to find.</p>
<p>I noticed after taking the mirrors off that some of the wall still had adhesive on it. I ended up tearing out all the drywall anyway because I was doing a remodel but plan on having to do some drywall repair. If you have no experience in this keep in mind that you can do it yourself if so inclined. Just use a putty knife and maybe a hammer to clean off the adhesive (try to knock it off) and then apply new compund/sand/compound/sand and then spray some texture to match the rest of the wall. Much of that can be skipped if you’re covering it all back up with another mirror or something else. </p>
<p>Now, what will you put on the wall in place of the mirror?</p>
<p>Wow, Bunsen, thank goodness you weren’t hurt!</p>
<p>When my D was a sophomore in undergrad and still a theater major, she and the cast of her current play were sitting in a rehearsal room with their director. She was sitting on the floor with a huge mirror on the wall behind her. CABOOM–the mirror fell off the wall and hit her on the head. No apparent injury but she went to the emergency room to be checked just in case. </p>
<p>So yes, all mirrors should be firmly screwed into walls. We have new mirrors in our main bath from our local Home Depot that have little attached tabs that screw into the wall.</p>
<p>Thanks! I already have work boots, rose gloves, protective eyewear, cardboard boxes and shop vac lined up ready to go. The explosion was, apparently, so powerful, that chards of glass blew out of the bathroom onto the carpet in the bedroom. I’m used to dealing with broken glass - I’m a lab rat. When a 12-liter flask breaks, there is a lot to clean up!</p>
<p>I studied the wall where the mirror used to be - it is amazing how cleanly it broke off! No glue on the wall - I could not have done it better even if I tried to remove it.</p>
<p>Me thinks I will need another mirror. It is hard to apply makeup when you cannot see what you are doing I’m looking for mirrors with lighted edges, just like the cool mirror we had in our hotel in Berlin. Any design suggestions are welcome - the old mirror was probably 7 feet by 4 feet. Yup, a big sucker. I think 2 separate framed mirrors and a makeup shelf in the middle will be a good design.</p>
<p>I think it will be easy to convince my safety crazy H to replace the glued on the wall mirrors in the other two bathrooms!</p>
<p>Bookiemom - ouch, I’m so glad your D was OK. Any head injury should not be dismissed -remember Natascha Richardson? Plastic fasteners can break, too - the atmospheric oxygen breaks down plastic and makes it brittle and unstable with time.</p>
<p>It is very possible to glue a mirror to the wall using Liquid Nails and never, ever have it come down nor will you be able to take it down without considerable effort. I’ve run into this problem in several houses where I wanted to take a mirror down and the only way to do it is to tear up the drywall when you remove it.</p>
<p>One November we decided to have our front door with its two sidelites and the huge trapezoidal window above it (entry has a vaulted ceiling) replaced. The door, the window, and our contractor arrived and I went to work. When I returned that afternoon, the entire wall section on the front of the house was a gaping black hole about 8 feet wide and 14 feet high, and part of the foyer floor was open to the basement (about 3X8 feet worth). </p>
<p>Apparently, when they removed the existing door there was so much wood rot and carpenter ant damage that the window above collapsed in pieces, along with much of the flanking walls, and some of the subflooring was rotted as well. Of course, this required replacing the entire foyer and half-bath floor, along with rebuilding the front wall, and added at least 5K to the cost of replacing the door and window. </p>
<p>Not to mention the inconvenience of having a wall consisting of a giant sheet of plastic for several days when there was 2 feet of snow on the ground.</p>
<p>Lessons - 1) better to replace those windows in the summer, 2) remodeling jobs are always bigger than they appear before you actually open things up, 3) have a backup fund in case the job ends up being WAY more expensive than you planned.</p>
<p>MomLive, I’m actually glad that they did not use liquid nails. I did not like the mirror to begin with, but I was afraid to even suggest to DH that the bathroom needed a little bit of sprucing up - after all, the house is only 12 years young. Without the mirror, our huge bathroom looks smallish…</p>
<p>sylvan - I’m simply :eek: I imagine that in addition to that $5K project, your heating bill was pretty high that month.</p>
<p>Totally agree - would never use liquid nails because then you can’t easily change out the mirror later. In one of our bathrooms they put up a enormous mirror and used a mirrored bevel edge to frame it. The problem is water got behind the mirror at the edges and the mirrored part flaked off. It looked terrible and there are no way to remove the mirror without tearing up the wall. </p>
<p>I’m glad you weren’t hurt but it sounds like the mirror falling off the wall was a blessing. Have fun redecorating.</p>
<p>At our parish rectory, a young priest was sitting at his desk in his room when a heavy metal (wrought-iron?) light fixture came loose and crashed down on his head. He had severe head injuries. This was several years ago and I don’t know that he was ever able to return to his job as a priest, as the blow injured the speech area of his brain.</p>
<p>When we moved into our newly constructed house 17 year ago, we were short on funds. We bought large, basic, plain mirrors for the bathrooms and H attached them using screws and fastners. We also bought cheap towel racks and light fixtures, figuring when we had more money we’d replace them. Fast-forward 17 years, we still have ugly towel hangers from Walmart that look like they belong in a 1970s summer camp, and cheap lights over them. We finally replaced the stuff in the downstairs powder room, but the 2 upstairs full baths… :(</p>
<p>Lafalum, that is absolutely awful. Poor young man…</p>
<p>I hear you about being short on funds. We finally replaced the ugly brass, fake Tiffany-style lights throughout the house. The builder of this house gave us a light fixture allowance, and being short on funds, when we went to pick out what we wanted, we decided to divert 75% of the allowance towards the light fixture above the staircase (we picked a really fancy one because it would have been a nightmare to replace a chandelier hanging from 18 feet above floor), and use the other 25% to get cheapo stuff for the rest of the house with the intent to replace it years later. Yup, this reminds me - I will ask hubby about replacing our bathroom light as well. It is as high maintenance as they get (glass bowls that collect dust and dead insects) and uses 1 kilowatt of electricity! :eek:</p>
<p>When H was building the deck, he asked me to hold something up, it started to fall and I didn’t get out of the way in time. A 2 x 4 did fall on my head, and I ended up in urgent care getting my head sewn up. Scared both of us. I was OK, but H has never asked me for help again.</p>
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