Mirror Mirror on the Wall

My parents bought Kelly and me a giftcard to Ikea for our anniversary because they knew we really wanted a dresser from there. We set it up and it looks so good! But the wall above it looked blank. Like the rest of the walls in our room. I decided that a mirror above the dresser would be a good thing, so I set off on a quest to find a suitable mirror. The result was a $10 mirror from Craigslist. Awesome. I drove down to DC and picked it up from an ornery guy who had a hard time with English, but I had my mirror. The only problem is...it looked like this:

While it is kind of a quirky-cute sea green color, it was scraped up like crazy and didn't match anything in our apartment, especially our white-walled bedroom with black furniture and red bedspread and curtains, which was to become its home. A quick trip to home depot and that part of me that definitely comes from my mom remedied it, though. Two days of sanding, taping, and 3 coats of black paint fixed it. Mostly.

The only problem was when I took the tape and paper off the glass, the mirror reflected the unpainted back edge. Poop. So I got to work prying off the back which was stapled down by a crazy-strong giant, no doubt. Ask Kelly; it was quite a job. But I got it done, with some help from my trusty assistant, Kelly, painted the back, and cleaned off the mirror with a razor to get off the paint that Houdini'd through my tape the first time around. Fortunately, while the back had been haphazardly stapled on, there were these two metal bars that probably had been used to hold it to another (green, I hope,) dresser at some point and they were attached with screws. So I kept those, got out the handy drill that Kelly won in a raffle at our high school graduation party (I won a chair. It's still in Utah.) and fixed the back on way better than it had been! Hooray! I love that drill that Kelly won. He's never used it, but I sure do a lot. At least he didn't win a pedicure kit like his friend Aaron did. Ha ha ha. Anyway, back to my mirror. I hooked on some hang-it-to-the-wall-loopy-things (that's the official name for them, you know) and got it on the wall! Check out our awesome dresser with a formerly-scratched-up-green-mirror-that-is-now-new-looking-and-black!

I'm so awesome.

Oh yeah, by the way see those pictures on the dresser? Kelly and I also fixed some old ugly brown frames by painting the black, letting them dry, then painting a thick coat of red over the top, and then sponging it while it was still wet to make it look all cool and marble-y.

Then we stuck some of our baby pictures in them. Aren't we cute?