DIY Bathroom Mirror With Lights

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Don’t you just love the high-end look of light fixtures mounted on the bathroom mirror?

When I had my decorating business, we would have the glass company float light fixtures on the bathroom mirror all the time for clients.

So when we were remodeling our guest bath, I just knew I wanted that same designer look in there

But we had to figure out how to do it because we didn’t want to just call the glass company — where’s the fun in that??

So we figured it out

And it really wasn’t that difficult

But it was tricky

Now I’m not sure if this is the way the pros do it or not but it worked for us:

We’re trying to upcycle as many things as we can from the original house so we started with the mirror that was already mounted on the wall.

For safety, we put strips of wide blue tape all over it and wore eye protection and gloves

It was really easy to take down. It was just held up there by 3 spots of glue on the bottom that were 55 years old and two clips at the top

We figured out the size we wanted the finished mirror to be based on the size that our frame was going to be. Then we used a handheld glass cutter to make the first cut. (Be sure to wear eye protection and use caution when cutting glass!) The first cut worked great. Then we had to make the long cut for the height. We scored it and when we went to snap the piece off, it didn’t work and the edge was a jagged mess. So that mirror was toast.

Luckily, there was another mirror in another bathroom that we could use. And we were able to cut it perfectly!

First hurdle cleared…

Now it was time to cut the holes in the mirror for the lights. We made a template from a board so we could get the placement exactly right.

Mr. Redoux attached the template to the mirror with plastic clamps so that the holes on the template lined up with where the holes needed to be in the mirror.

Then he used a round hole saw made for cutting glass and tile to cut the holes in the mirror. Again, use all safety precautions when working with and cutting glass.

This is the hole we used

You want to make sure the size of your saw will make a hole that’s large enough to barely clear your electrical box but still be covered by your light base

Follow the instructions that come with the saw for cutting the holes.

Here are some helpful tips that worked for us:

Tape the mirror surface with wide blue tape to minimize the chance of shattering

Place the mirror on a hard flat surface covered with cardboard

Wear eye protection and gloves

Keep the mirror and saw blade wet at all times

Go slowly

Don’t push down or add pressure — let the saw do all the work

It’s a good idea to practice on an old piece of mirror first

And we had plenty of that!

Now it’s time to mount it to the wall

We have a unique situation in that our wall has a bit of a bow in the middle of it so we needed to use some mirror mounting clips on either side of the bow to help secure it to the wall. (We also live in So Cal which is earthquake country so we needed to be sure it’s not going to come flying off the wall if things start shaking)

These are the clips we used

You can see the base of the top ones at the top of the photo

Mr. Redoux put tape on the bottom ones to keep them from scratching the back of the mirror

We applied mirror adhesive to the wall

Then we lifted the mirror onto the wall and set the bottom into the clips, lining up our holes with the electrical boxes

We put the clips into the brackets at the top and gently pressed to make sure it was making contact with the adhesive

Now we’re ready for our frame

We made ours out of primed finger-joint trim boards. The sides are 3” wide, the bottom is 2 1/2’ wide and the top is 3 1/2” wide.

For our top we used panel molding and ripped the rounded top off of it on the table saw so that the top is now flat

We made our top cornice by gluing and nailing this ‘crown’ piece to the top piece of 3 1/2” trim and mitered the corners back on the sides. Then we added a piece of door stop to the bottom of the trim board.

For the bottom of the mirror, we just added a piece of door stop the the top of the 2 1/2” trim board.

The sides will stay plain

We kept the 4 pieces (sides, top and bottom) separate until we put them all together when we mounted them to the wall

We cut out part of the back of each piece just enough to overlap the mirror. We also had to cut out a little more to allow for the brackets

This is a mock-up we made to see if it would work

We installed dowels and holes to the ends of the sides to join the sides to the top and bottom when it goes on the wall

Then we pre-painted everything

Now we’re ready to assemble it on the wall

We put a small amount of construction adhesive on the top and put it in place overlapping the mirror the amount of our cut. We put a little wood glue on the dowels on our sides and construction glue on the trim piece and put the sides in place, pushing the dowels into the holes until it was tightly joined. Then we did the same for the bottom

We used a nail gun to nail it into the studs in the wall in a few places to mount it tight.

We touched up the holes, mounted our lights

And we were done!