New mirrors may reflect your home’s best attributes

Consider more stylish looking glasses when you put your home up for sale.

In anticipation of the day when the housing market shifts from today’s sellers’ market to one that’s more balanced between buyers and sellers — or even one favoring buyers — you might want to consider using mirrors to make your home look lighter, brighter and bigger.

Take a hard look at your bathroom mirrors.

Do you still have the massive, unframed, flat mirrors behind your bathroom vanities?

Consider replacing these with tasteful, right-sized framed mirrors.

Of course, as with many home improvement projects, this may require that you even out the wall texture after you pull that massive mirror down.

Then you might have to repaint around the mirror. Depending on the last time you painted the bathroom, you may not be able to match the paint color, so you may need to repaint the whole bathroom.

Since you’ve already gone that far, you may want to update the light fixtures above the new mirrors – especially if you have those motel-like fixtures with the long, thin rectangle box containing six or eight round light bulbs.

You’re already planning to retexture and repaint the walls. What’s one more little task?

And now that you have those stylish, framed mirrors and new light fixtures, take a look at the medicine cabinets.

Do they have those black ink-spot looking blemishes around the edges?

Wouldn’t a cabinet with a beveled edged mirror look nicer?

If you do upgrade the medicine cabinets, you might want to wall texture and paint before install the new medicine cabinet. Or at least try the new cabinet out before installing it to see if there are any rough edges showing.

It isn’t worth all the effort if you’ve got the outline of the former mirror, light fixture or medicine cabinet showing.

You might also want to replace your sliding closet doors with new ones faced with mirrors.

While there are various camps on the desirability mirrored closet doors, they sure do make your rooms look light and bright.

After you’ve upgraded your bathroom mirrors, look around the house to see if you can hang a large, decorative mirror to help the other rooms in the house look bigger and brighter.

Before you sell, you’ll want to take down the family portraits. Why not replace those small, framed pictures with a great big mirror?

And if you want to add a little Fung Shui with your mirrors, just look it up in your favorite search engine, and you’ll see what to do if you want to speed up or slow down the flow of energy through your house.

Can buyers use mirrors, too? Of course!

Try the PeeWee Herman trick of strapping a small mirror on the top of your shoe to see underneath things like cabinets and appliances when you’re kicking the tires on a home you may want to buy.

By Leslie Sargent Eskildsen for OCR