Bedroom mirror before + after

Stopping in quickly today to talk about my latest mini-makeover.

I've been wanting to refinish our dresser mirror in our bedroom for the longest time. It has been calm here since the last weekend of crazyness, so today was the perfect day to get it done before the next wave of destruction & renovation begins.

In our old home, all of our furniture was black... which was okay, but since I'm going for the whole light-airy-beachy-natural vibe, I've been giving all the black pieces a facelift one by one.

My first mirror refinishing experience, if you can remember back to February, went like this:

Before....

....After

And this was our before, about 5 hours ago...

Since Brad won't let me get a new dresser (yet, I'm still working on it...) I figured I could at least do something with the mirror. I was debating between painting it white, a pale turquoise, leaving it as bare wood, doing some sort of distressing technique... in the end I decided I'd sand it down, see what the wood looked like, and then go from there.

So the sanding began...

It was taking a long time, as always, so I figured I'd pour some stripper on it and see if it helped speed the process up.

It worked.

In the middle of all the sanding, my neighbor stopped by with a present they caught in the river...

They made me hold him.

I felt bad for the poor little guy, but they set him free in our pond so we'll be able to keep an eye on him.... and hope he doesn't grow too fast.

Anyway, back to the mirror. Another hour or so of sanding and I was pretty happy with the results. I decided not to paint it, but instead to leave it as more of a natural/distressed type finish. The wood color was slightly too warm for me so I decided to give it a thin wash of white paint and water:

I rubbed a thin layer on with a sock:

And it lightened the whole thing up just the right amount.

So here's the new and improved afters!

Yay, no more big black mirror to wake up to every morning!

The two turquoise frames used to be black also—I picked up at the dollar store a while back and simply spray painted them and filled them with some personalized art.

Speaking of art, I've just introduced a new coordinating set to my shop! Summer is here and the bugs have been out in full force, so I took some inspiration from the season and designed this set that would be perfect for a garden themed nursery: