Ceiling tile mirror tutorial

Thank you to a lovely reader, who's email reminded me that I needed to do a tutorial for my ceiling tile mirror, so here is it. 

I found these ceiling tiles at a huge flea market thing near Dallas called First Mondays. It's HUGE. Booths and booths and aisles and aisles of stuff for sale. Some craft stuff, lots of vintage, anything you can imagine. I found these for $6 a piece, but offered her $5, and she accepted. 

I went to Home Depot and picked up some 2x2's, which I think ran me $12 for 4 of them. My tiles were 12x12, so I built an outer frame that was 36x36 (of course, this measurement is going to depend on your tile size). Next, I made a grid on the inside, so that when I nailed in my tiles, I'd have something to attach it to. 

Yeah, see that extra piece on the left? That's there because I didn't put the wood in the right place, so the middle left tile didn't have anything to nail it into. No worries, I just added another piece of wood. It's a very forgiving project. 

Now, some of my tiles didn't match up exactly. I'll blame that on the tiles, instead of the more likely fact that my outer wood measurement probably wasn't perfect. So when I had it all assembled, you could see the wood in between some of the tiles. With the tile being super distressed, you wouldn't want to just put one color in there, or it'd be super obvious that you're faking it. So I loosely mixed together some similar colors, and dabbed it in the cracks. 

And seriously, when it's hanging on the wall, you cannot tell that I had to fudge it. At all. 

For the mirror, I just bought a 12 inch mirror from Michaels (don't forget that you can use a competitors coupon!) and some trim from Home Depot. Measure and cut that wood at a 45º angle. Attach with some glue, paint that bad boy, glue on the mirror. I just used wood glue to attach it to the tile, weighed down overnight with my kettlebell and my medicine ball on the corners. 

Don't feel like jacking with the trim and the mirror? I did see a square 13 inch mirror at Walmart for under $10. Grab that and slap that on instead. 

And here we are! Seriously, it might have been one of the easiest projects I've ever done.