Several years ago, before my husband and I lived together, my husband’s father gave him a dreadful, hanging, mail sorter… thing.

It went unused until we moved in together. We didn’t know what else to do with it, I didn’t want to store it and he didn’t want to throw it away, so we used it. We hung it on the wall and it matched absolutely nothing. It did, however, turn out to be quite useful, so when we moved to another apartment, we put it up again and continued using it. When the time came to hang it again in the newest apartment, I was sick of it looking awful and decided that refinishing it would be more economical than replacing it. So off to the hardware store I went.

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This week I decided to take an old, ugly mirror and make it pretty enough to fit in with my gorgeous new apartment. The mirror was bought by my mother over a decade ago because she thought it would match the decorating scheme of my teenage bedroom. It didn’t. It continued its streak of not matching anything I own through a couple more bedrooms until last week, when I figured that enough was enough and went shopping for a replacement. After not being able to find anything suitable (and non-ugly) at a price I was willing to pay, I came to the cold, hard realization that this mirror was going to follow me to the ends of the Earth. This is when I decided that I would try painting it, because chances were slim that it would come out looking worse.

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