Before we left Florida for Arizona, we wanted to make something to take with us for our tiny house. We had an old broken mirror and a nice pallet, so the answer seemed obvious: make a new frame for the mirror out of the pallet!
We also used a large piece of 1/4″ plywood to make a back support for the mirror.
We started by taking apart the mirror and removing the glue and cardboard from the edges.
Then we took our measurements and drew the outline for the frame on the plywood.
Next, we used a circular saw to cut out the rectangle.
There are lots of ways to deconstruct a pallet. For this project, we decided doing it the fastest and easiest way would be fine: sawing the planks off right at the joints. You lose some wood doing it this way, but this pallet was large enough to provide us with more than enough for our mirror frame, so it didn’t matter.
Once we had enough boards, we used a miter saw to even out the ends.
Then we sanded them with an orbital sander.
Next, we set everything in place to see how it all fit together.
Instead of using a miter joint, we cut a couple of the boards into small squares to join the corners. We thought it worked better with the scrap wood aesthetic.
After everything was in place and it all fit together perfectly, we numbered the boards so that we could put them all back the exact same way after we put the glue down. We also drew arrows to indicate which way the boards were facing.
Then it was simply a matter of gluing everything together. We used Gorilla Glue to glue the mirror glass to the plywood, and for the boards, we used Tightbond Premium II wood glue.
Before gluing the boards down, we stained them with a combination of light and dark stains. Then we gave them a light coat of polyurethane.
Once the boards were all in place, we clamped them down and let the glue dry for 24 hours.
And here is the finished mirror!
