Patterned Tile Wall Mirror

Oh hey guys, remember me? I promise I did not forget you, I just took a bit of an unplanned hiatus 🙂 After getting the Split on the market, I switched into focusing on my own house and had lots of gardening plans… and now suddenly it is summer break! Yikes!

The great news is, I settled on the Split Decision and have purchased my next house. It’s a baby 🙂 Not new, just small. And I’m excited to get in there and see what I can do with a smaller house. Granted, I have no idea what it looks like inside as I don’t officially own it yet, and the last I saw, it was still occupied. Based on that, and from what we can tell from the outside, there is a chance we may not need to do much on the inside at all, and we could just turn and do a true flip on it. Time will tell…

Speaking of the Split, I promised you a tutorial on the wall mirror, so without further ado…

I wanted to tie in the fireplace hearth with a piece on the mantel, and so I pulled the same design into this “tile” framed mirror.

Supplies

thin plywood, 33 1/2″ x 33 1/2″

1×2 – you can go with beefier trim here – I kind of wish I had!

2 @ 33 1/2″

2 @ 35″

scrap 1×4 (for back to attach mirror and plywood to frame)

2 @ 33 1/2″

1 @ 26 1/2″

24″ round Mirror

26 vinyl tiles, 5 3/8″ square

Note on tiles if you are creating your own on a vinyl cutter: I cut mine into 4 sets of 2 tiles, 4 sets of 4 tiles in a square, and 2 tiles cut into quarters. This makes laying out the design go very quickly.

Note: You can easily use different sized vinyl tiles, just adjust your plywood and frame sizes accordingly. I created a 1/4″ gap between the tiles to mimic the look of grout lines. So if you used 6″ tiles and 1/4″ gaps, your board would be 37 1/4″ square.

Steps

Begin by painting the board white, or whatever background color you would like to use.
Mark the center of each of the 4 edges. Beginning with one of the 4 sets of 2 tiles, centered the two tiles on the center of the board and lined up with the edge of the board.
Repeat step 2 for each of the 4 sides.
Next, lay out the remaining edges, leaving 1/4″ gap inbetween the tiles. This is where I used my 4×4 tile sets, placing one in each corner. You will notice that not all of my gaps are perfect, but taken all together, you don’t notice it much. In other words, don’t stress on getting them perfect.
For the very inside, I added the quarter tiles to finish out the design.
I used the hanging hardware that came with the mirror to hang it on the board. After measuring where the brace should sit, I created the frame below so that the brace could screw through the horizontal 1×4.
I finished off the frame by gluing and nailing the the 1x2s to the 1×4 frame. All set!