847 Years of Bad Luck

Mirror, mirror on the wall...

...Who's going to rescue us if you fall?

We have two gigantic mirrors in the downstairs dining room. We never liked them much, but they were so big and awkward we didn't know how to remove them. That all changed on Saturday.

Kathy had stripped all the wallpaper from this room -- all except for the space behind the two mirrors. We'd arrived at the moment of truth: it's either us or the mirrors.

These aren't just any little vanity mirrors, either. They're each more than 7 feet high and almost 4 feet wide. Bigger than a big person. They reach to well above your head and they're fixed to the wall with no obvious brackets or holders, which means they're probably glued directly to the wall. We'll have no idea how to get them off until we start prying on them.

I'll be honest; I'm afraid of them. Getting my fingers behind a giant mirror and pulling? That's just begging for a Faces of Death-style grisly demise. Imagine 7 feet of jagged mirror shards raining down on your head, under foot, in your eyes... Just thinking about it gave me the willies.

Fortunately, Kathy is made of sterner stuff. We covered the mirrors in plastic sheets in case the glass exploded outward. Here's Kathy taping up one sheet. Note that she's standing on a ladder in this photo. I told you the mirrors were tall. Then we put on goggles, heavy gloves, long sweaters, and heavy shoes. And then... pulled.

Lucky for us, the adhesive on the first mirror was pretty old and came away easily from the wall. (Which begs the question: if we hadn't removed the mirror when we did, how much longer would it have stayed there on its own?) Once it was loose, we had to set it down -- gently -- without scratching the floor. Kathy had wadded up more plastic sheeting, so this went pretty much as planned.

Okay, now to get it out of the room and out of the house. We opened up all the back doors and carefully, gently, slowly tipped the mirror over on one side so that we're carrying it horizontally instead of vertically. (That is, it's now 7 feet long and only 4 feet high.) The thing must weigh 50-70 pounds. It's surprisingly heavy. As we pass through each door I imagine accidentally banging it against the door frame, or catching a piece of furniture, or losing my grip and -- BAM! -- the mirror grenades into a million pieces, throwing reflective shrapnel throughout the house.

Out in the backyard, we lay it flat on the ground, where we've placed a big tarp. Another tarp goes on top of it, and then we get to the fun part: breaking the mirror. Kathy grabs a brick, stands back to what we hope is a safe distance, and lobs the brick directly at the mirror.

It bounces. No lie, a freakin' brick bounced off that stupid mirror. Hmm. Now what? I take my turn, and this time we put a few cracks in it. Several bricks later, and we've finally shattered the thing into poodle-sized pieces. I'm sure the neighbors were horrified by the noise. It sounded like the worst restaurant accident imaginable. We're bulls in a china shop.

The second mirror didn't come off the wall as easily. We had to really wrench at this one, which made me wince and squirm a little bit. Finally it pops loose, drops to the floor, and gets taken outside like its twin. We're getting good at lobbing bricks so it comes apart pretty swiftly.

So... what do you do with 150 pounds of fatally jagged broken mirror? By no coincidence, tomorrow is "super garbage" day, where the local waste-management company will take up to seven bins of anything you've got. We doled out the shards among three garbage cans and filled the rest with Styrofoam, newspapers, and other light items. They go to the curb tonight.

I hope we don't see any bloody, mangled garbageman corpses in the morning.