DIY Wood Sunburst Mirror

As I mentioned last week, I've been itchin' to change up my front room. It was a hard decision to make, but after much thought, I decided to do it. I'll give you the short end of a long story...well, not really. Anyway, here's the deal. My house use to have the main accent color as black...black frames, black tables, etc. So, all of our family pictures were always black and white with black frames.

When I started redecorating, I kept finding that I was leaning more and more towards natural earthy colors, and what goes best with natural earthy colors? Brown. Black does too...but for what I was going for, brown was what I wanted.

Now, black and brown can co-exist. But when I wanted to put one of our old pictures up...it just never looked right. So, as all my rooms slowly transformed to browns, my front room was a haven for all of those pictures because it was now the only room in the house with black accents. And the only real reason for that was because of the pictures. So, I found myself decorating around the pictures. And the only reason for that was I felt that I had to have those pictures somewhere, because I really don't have any other pictures of us in our house and the hubs kept giving me crap about it. Anyway. Long story....so, I never really liked the room because I was decorating it for the wrong purpose.

When I first started to venture into redecorating the space, I still wanted to keep the grounding color black, but I found this totally awesome fabric that I had to have....and it of course, naturally had brown in it. And so the crazy redecorating process ensued.First up was to take off all the pictures on the wall and put up something in its place. I didn't want to spend much money....and it had to make a statement.

....aka...be huge :) and the fabric was calling for something a little more vintage looking...and brown, of course. So, I remembered seeing this beauty over at Ballard Designs:

and thought that I could totally make that. Ha!....and so the insanity began. Here is a peek into my mind: 

I cut up a Bed Bath and Beyond catalogue into rectangles, then from there cut them into triangles and tried to configure someway to make my mirror look like Ballards. 

These are just two of the many many ways I tried....I think I had decided to pursue the bottom design.

So, first off. I took my cedar planks and drew up my cut lines. I measured the length at 22"then found the middle on one of the short sides, and drew a line from the corner of the other to the middle mark. Did this on the other corner also.

I did this ten times, using 5 cedar planks. I then used my miter saw to cut the separate pieces.

And used my jigsaw to cut the triangle pieces. I warn you...this did take some time :) 10 large triangles and 20 small triangles later::::

I laid them out on the grass to the same design as the magazine cutouts....and it looked completely awful. So, awful that I thought, "jeez, what a waste of time. Now I have all these pieces for no good reason." lol "I guess they'll make good firewood."

I almost gave up...especially when I realized that in order to do that design, I would need twice as many cuts as I had....Then I thought about maybe putting some space in between them, so I wouldn't have to do any more cuts or go to the store again to get more wood. Yes...laziness.

But, thanks to that laziness...that's when the final design came to be :) So, first, I took the smaller triangles, and put them straight side against the largest triangle. Measured them 4" down from the top of the big triangle, and cut of the bottoms.

Then, I used some wood glue to secure them together:

Next I stained them a dark chestnut.

Then I cut a circle out of plywood using my jigsaw and used a nail gun to secure all the pieces together to the circle. I did this on the cement in the garage for a level surface, measuring the empty space between them with my level. It ended up being a little more than the width of the level. Not exact...but you can't tell, can you? Exactly :)

Then I used some poly to seal it up.It gave it a nice shine too :) The bottom right three are with poly, and the rest aren't. What a difference it makes! 

Once everything was dried, I bought a 12" circular mirror and secured it to the top of the sunburst with Gorilla Glue. Love that stuff! :)

I waited overnight for this to dry in place, and then added some felt to the back of the mirror on the plywood (don't mind the hack job).

And then added a picture hanger to the back. I used a bit larger nails than the ones it came with, just to make sure it would stay in there, cuz baby....this thing is heavy!

Got it up on the wall and was relieved :) Finally, after two years...just this amount of change made me actually love this room, and want to be in it :)

Of course, the new pillow covers helped a bit too.

This is about 50" in circumference.I know :) huge!!!

Exactly what I was going for! 

Next up for a change? The curtains! I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them...but I'm excited!

Luckily, for now...they still go with the pillows, so it won't drive me too crazy :)

Total cost of this sunburst mirror?

Cedar planks: $8.15

Mirror: $3

Everything else I had on hand.

Total: $11.15.

Umm...yes, I think I would rather have this than the $349 Ballard mirror :)