Dental floss works magic on removing mirror tiles

Dear Mr. HandyPerson: I saw your recent column in The Seattle Times about removing mirror tiles from a wall. Forget about hair dryers and spatulas - use dental floss. Have a good stock of it on hand, and some heavy gloves and safety glasses. Start at the bottom and slide the floss between the stick-on pads, if you can identify their position. Then just start flossing the adhesive pads. Flossing through the foam pads can go very fast, so a second pair of hands to grab the mirror tile as it loosens is helpful.

This will leave portions of some of the stick-on pads on the wall, but you can often remove most of them by doing more flossing. Maybe then a hair dryer will soften the remaining adhesive enough that you can rub it off with minimal damage to the wall underneath.

I have used this idea in several situations - even in my refrigerator. I had a giant glass jar that had become stuck to the glass shelf in my refrigerator. When I tried to pick up the jar, it broke and left the bottom stuck to the shelf with sharp, jagged edges. I left the shelf in the refrigerator (to hold it steady) and proceeded to floss, and it worked just great.

I am a handyperson "wannabe," and as a widow I am always looking for an easier or better way of doing things. - Joan, Federal Way, Wash.

Dear Joan: In Mr. HandyPerson's view, you are already past the "wannabe" phase, as you have demonstrated with your handy ways of solving these two problems. He was particularly impressed at your "flossing" off the broken jar stuck to the refrigerator shelf, as he recently encountered a similar situation in his own refrigerator, though his jar did not break, fortunately. He used warm water on a damp rag and a thin-bladed putty knife to get the jar unstuck.

A number of other readers wrote recently in response to the same column to suggest a similar technique for removing those mirror tiles using dental floss or 50-pound-test monofilament fishing line to "saw" through the adhesive pads just like the dental floss method described in your letter.

Several years ago the issue of removing mirror tiles from a wall came up in the column in a reader's letter. Mr. HP explained how to remove them carefully with a thin spackling knife while using heavy gloves, wearing safety glasses, and placing some kind of tarp or drop cloth on the floor to protect it from falling glass fragments, more or less the same advice he gave recently.

Then shortly after that column appeared, he got a number of letters from readers suggesting the use of dental floss or monofilament fishing line to make the removal faster and easier and to do less damage, with luck, to the wall surface behind the mirror tile.

And you know what, Joan? Mr. HP forgot it completely in the ensuing years. This got Mr. HandyPerson thinking about how the brain and memory work, and in this age of computers and stored memory, he wondered if it's possible that one reaches a certain point where the brain, like a computer, is more or less full to capacity and in order to add new ideas, some of the old information needs to be discarded! Not being a brain surgeon (or a rocket scientist), he is not sure this idea has any real validity, but it doesn't seem more far-fetched than some of the things we know about now, like black holes in space (he suspects this is where socks go when they disappear from the dryer).

Mr. HandyPerson wants to hear of home repair matters that are troubling you. Write to: Mr. HandyPerson, c/o Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main Street, Kansas City, Mo. 64111.