My first garden mirror

Ever since I built the screen from the shower door I've been paying more attention to this sort of thing in other gardens. Luckily I have gardening friends in garden-rich areas of the country (Seattle and Portland especially) where garden tours and open garden weekends are as common as garage sales it seems, so I've seen some great examples of mirrors in gardens. I'm ready to give that a try in my own garden!

I have a couple of large mirrors in the garage that I've been saving for some future project, but they're so heavy and too big (and buried behind lots of collected lumber, doors, and other goodies) so I've not been motivated to try a mirror in the garden. That changed recently when new neighbors moved in a few doors down.

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I noticed a mirror in what appeared to be their pile of moving day discards, and when I saw it at the street on trash pickup day I grabbed it!

It's not in perfect condition of course, with an obviously broken edge covered by duct tape...

...and a couple of stickers:

No worries, as I had a plan to deal with this. First I removed the stickers, which revealed a secret word...

...although that crack turned into a break:

Here's the broken edge that the duct tape was hiding:

Still no worries -- the plan will work!


(imagine sounds of power saws, sanders, and drills here...)


The secret word easily scraped off with a blade, and the broken edges were hidden by a cedar frame:

As with the screen project, the only difficult part of this project was cutting the groove in which the mirror edge fits. A couple of passes on the table saw was all it took though. (I should post about how exactly I did that on my other blog -- what do you think? Haven't posted there for a long time...)

The small pieces of wood were glued into place -- quick and easy!

A bit of stain/sealer to protect the wood, and this is ready for mounting somewhere:

I'm thinking that this will be most effective under the deck where there is now a bit more light because of the skylights. Since I don't have a fence I'd have to make it freestanding if I want it out in the yard, and I expect birds would fly into it all the time out there -- I certainly want to avoid that!

I'm thinking that I'd hang it horizontally, but we'll see.


Note: after working on this project last Friday I started organizing my garage. The other mirrors may soon be accessible so I may be adding another one to the garden somewhere soon!

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