D.I.Y.

How to Remove a Builder Grade Mirror

March 2, 2022

I’m here to answer your age old question: how do I remove a builder grade mirror? I know, you have been asking this forever and are dying to know if and how you can do it yourself. Fear not, I’m here to help you by sharing how you can rock that mirrors glue right off. You’ll need the right tools and a little bit of strength and determination to peel that mirror right off.

The Reality of Removing A Builder Grade Mirror

Truth be told, although the steps of removing a builder grade mirror are quite simple, the actual act of doing it is less simple. If your mirror is properly secured it will be glued really well and therefore require a ton of shims and even more patience. Arm strength will also come in handy but isn’t overly necessary if you’re prepared to get creative (aka find some long shims). There’s also that fear of potentially smashing your mirror into a zillion pieces. Magically I did remove this builder grade mirror by myself and ended up with an (almost) undamaged mirror. If there are two people tackling this together it’s feasible to keep it fully in tact.

What You Need to Remove Your Builder Grade Mirror

Tape – I used painters tape but frogs tape because I wanted to reuse this mirror in the gym and not have to fuss with removing duct tape from the mirror.
Gloves – in case your mirror does shatter
Safety goggles – same reason as above
Closed toed shoes incase the mirror shatters or falls on your foot!
Shims – I used a variety of scrap wood and painting stir sticks
Rubber mallet

How to Remove a Builder Grade Mirror

Tape your mirror off. I taped along the perimeter of the mirror, and then created a grid like pattern in the middle.
Wearing your safety goggles and gloves, place your shims between your mirror and the wall.
Take your rubber mallet and gently tap the shims in. You may need to layer your shims to be able to get that glue peeling off – you should hear the glue pull away from the wall – it sounds like the candy pop rocks and is oh so satisfying.
Repeat this process until you can reach your fingers between the mirror and the wall (or plywood which is what my mirror was attached to).
Gently pull the mirror. If you’re able to get traction in this capacity, keep pulling!
If you’re not, move to shim phase two: long thick shims. I found a decently long piece of scrap wood and tapped it in behind the mirror using the mallet. I was able to get the middle layer of glue off using this method.
From here, I was able to gently pull the mirror off the wall.

All in all this took almost 3 hours for me to remove a builder grade mirror by myself. It could have been that I was approaching this too timidly. It also could have been that it was aggressively glued on and took some serious shimmy-ing to get it off. Either way. It’s off and we are onto some exciting next steps in the builder grade bathroom update!!