After a month of frantic renovation (which is nowhere nearly finished but a lot of the dirty work is done), we’re finally moving into our new home today – hurrah!

Until the weekend, we’d been focusing on the renovation stuff – pulling down ugly fake walls, cleaning out sooty chimneys and ripping down plasterboard in preparation for damp-proofing work (the last thing resulted in the discover of a secret new room, it’s sadly unusable without a lot of expensive work so we’re leaving it for now) – and so hadn’t given much thought to the finer points of today’s move, such as working out where all our stuff is going to go.

We’ve got a giant (120cm/4ft square) frameless mirror above our fireplace in the living room here (acquired from a shop changing room refit apparently) and I think it will probably be relocated to above the fireplace in the dining room of the new house – but I think its lack of frame will look odd there.

How can I make a frame using recycled materials and/or repurposing other stuff?

My first thought is to try something make from reclaimed wood because the fireplace’s mantelpiece will be an old building joist – I’m not an expert woodworker but willing to give it a go. Heh, actually, perhaps I should make a frame using my existing craft skills and knit one ;)

Any other suggestions?

We’ve already covered whole mirror tiles but Claire has asked:

Can a broken mirror go in the glass recycling bin?

I suspect not – most glass banks I’ve seen stipulate they can only take standard bottles and jars, not sheet glass or pyrex or the like.

While there is obviously a safety concern (wear tough gloves, be careful), you could reuse the pieces in crafts and around the home. Like the whole mirror tiles, big pieces made safe could be used to reflect more light around the greenhouse or garden, hand-size pieces could be used for pocket mirrors (I’ve seen pictures of people who’ve used foam or soft modelling clay around the back/edges to make them safer and more durable) and little pieces can be used for mosaics.

Any other suggestions?

There were four 30cm by 50cm frameless mirror tiles on the bathroom wall when I moved in but given there was no storage, I quickly (read: three years) replaced them with a cabinet instead.

Since then, the tiles have been floating around the bathroom/bedroom/hallway storage locations, waiting for us to reaffix them somewhere or get rid of them (neither of which has happened). We have enough mirrors around the place for when you’re as fugly as us and they’re not in great condition (bits of the mirrored backing having come off in various spots, particularly near the edges) anyway so we haven’t got around to re-using them as mirrors.

But what else can their reflective properties be used for instead? They’re essentially sheets of glass with a mirrored backing by the look of it – reasonably sturdy but not invincible. Any suggestions?