Mirrors
Buy and sell mirrors in Panama.
A full-length mirror leaning in a bedroom, a round rattan frame over a sofa, a backlit LED mirror above a bathroom sink: a mirror often outlives the room it was bought for, because the glass itself does not wear out. They come new and pre-owned, from plain bevelled glass to carved and gilded frames. Whether a used one is a good buy comes down to the silver backing, the frame and the way it hangs. And since any glass workshop in Panama will cut a plain mirror to size, the pieces worth hunting for are the framed and the lit ones.
Mirrors that lean and mirrors that hang:
the first split is whether the weight sits on the floor or on the wall. A full-length mirror leans against a wall, stands in its own tilting frame or screws to the back of a wardrobe door, and the leaning kind is the mirror people take with them when they move. Framed wall mirrors do the decorating: rattan and woven fibre for a beach-house feel, black metal for a modern flat, carved and gilded wood where the frame is the point, which brings them close to the pieces under art. In the bathroom it is either plain glass with a polished or bevelled edge, or an LED mirror with a backlit border, a touch switch and often an anti-fog pad behind the glass. A tabletop vanity mirror with a magnifying side is for close-up make-up; if what is missing is light on the face, lamps and wall lights are under lighting.
Concrete block, gypsum and the weight of glass:
a large mirror is heavier than it looks, and the wall decides how it hangs. Most Panamanian houses are concrete block, which takes a drilled hole, a plastic plug and a screw without complaint. Many apartment towers, from Bella Vista to Punta Pacífica, have gypsum board inside, and there a heavy mirror needs a screw into the metal stud or anchors made for board, because an ordinary plug pulls straight out. Knock first: block sounds solid, gypsum hollow. Glass quality shows in the reflection. Cheap full-length mirrors are often thin glass or acrylic on a board, and they bend the image: step back, sway side to side and watch whether a door frame curves. With an LED mirror, check whether it plugs in or wires into the wall, and that power actually reaches the spot where it will hang.
Plain glass cut to size, and what a frame is worth:
glass workshops all over the country will cut a plain mirror to the width of a vanity or a wardrobe door and bevel the edge, so a frameless one is cheap to replace and fetches little second-hand. A basic full-length mirror is about $20 to $40 new. What people pay for is the frame and the electronics: designer mirrors in rattan, carved wood or metal run from about $200 to $700 new, and the glass in them does not age. A used one with clean silver loses value to scuffs on the frame and to the trouble of collecting something fragile, not to the years.
Where a mirror’s silver backing gives out:
almost always at the edges. Dark spots or a grey haze creeping in from the rim mean moisture or cleaner has reached the backing, often glass spray that ran down to the bottom, and they keep spreading. No polish removes them, and resilvering an ordinary mirror costs more than a new one. Spots in the middle of a mirror that was glued up usually mean the wrong adhesive ate the backing from behind. Check the corners for hairline cracks where clips were overtightened, and the bottom of a floor mirror’s frame, because MDF that has met a wet mop swells and flakes. On an LED mirror, try every touch function and see that the whole border lights evenly.
Photographing a mirror without appearing in it:
angle the camera so the glass reflects a plain wall rather than you, then add close-ups of the corners and a shot of the back. Give the glass size and the outside size of the frame, and say whether it was screwed up or glued. A glued bathroom mirror often cracks on its way off the wall, so take it down before you list it, not after someone has agreed a price. Hand it over with cardboard taped on the corners and load it standing on its edge against something solid: glass laid flat in a pickup bed flexes over every pothole and cracks from a corner.