Mirror Mirror on the Wall

On our first day in the house, we took inventory of items the previous owners had left behind: some smoke-filled curtains, a packet of frozen Salisbury steaks, and an enormous mirror. While it makes sense to use a mirror to give an illusion of more space in a small home, this mirror is not our style.  For one thing, the border (which only goes around the sides and top, not the bottom) is hideous.  For another, it's huge.  And while it is probably worth a lot of money, its presence in the living room became more and more of a hassle.  But how to dispose of such a big piece of glass?  It's too big for Greg's pickup truck, it's super-heavy, and it's treacherous.  We put on our thinking caps.  Dave suggested carefully wrapping it and then shattering it.  Unlucky, but the best idea we had.

The first step was carefully placing the mirror on top of a thick (but not canvas, because they cost $33) dropcloth and taping it.  Greg and Andrea taped a contractor bag over the spot the dropcloth didn't cover.

Then, shattering.  The mirror was a little sturdier than expected, but some heavy whacks with mallets and hammers eventually did the trick.

Unfortunately, they also put holes in the dropcloth, making it clear that this project was going to be tricky.

After the mirror was shattered, we carefully rolled up the cloth into a vaguely body-bag shaped pile.  However, giant shards stuck out in several places.  At one point, as Andrea straddled the now deadly mirror, I reminded her that if she punctured her femoral artery, she would bleed out in minutes.

In order to try and reinforce the cloth, we snaked contractor bags around the whole mess.  The giant shards pierced the contractor bags as quickly as they had pierced the dropcloth.  I looked around the room and noticed the rolled-up sections of carpet that we had removed from upstairs.  After some hemming and hawing, we decided to gently (with the help of a snowshovel) roll the body bag onto a swatch of carpet.

Then, nearly exhausting our supplies of contractor bags and duct tape, we taped the contraption to the carpet.

Next, we wrapped the carpet around the "body" and taped it up.

At this point, we felt like conquerors, and we were happily unbloodied to boot.

The last step was dragging the carpet outside and loading it onto the truck.  We've heard that the mafia used to dispose of bodies rolled up in carpet bags, and considering our location, we hoped the neighbors wouldn't leap to conclusions.

Tomorrow, another trip to the dump, and the saga of the mirror will finally be over.