Hallway Gallery Wall

Hi guys! We're baaaack! We took a bit of a blogger hiatus during the month of April to prepare our home for our annual get-together with friends. Then we took a little time out and refreshed our minds with a quick weekend vacation out of town. Have you all been busy too? It's so hard to stay focused on weekend house work when the weather is just beckoning to be enjoyed! I'm loving this sun and warm rainy days! 

 

We're still hard at work in our hallway trying to make it more inviting. So far, we've refinished those hardwood floors, added new baseboards and chunky casing, updated the lighting, painted the walls in Ben Moore's Edgecomb Gray, and updated the interior doors.

 

The long, boring walls were having a Taylor Swift problem (ahem...blank space), so we corrected that by adding a gallery wall. This took us a month to put together. But, it's finally done!

Most of the artwork (or frames) in our house is of the botanical or animal nature. In fact, I only have two personal pictures prior to creating this massive picture wall.

This was a great excuse to actually dig through all of those travel and wedding photos in Shutterfly and finally print a few!

A gallery wall can be complicated and frustrating. There's a variety of methods of methods out there to that gallery wall madness... taping silhouettes of the frames to the wall, laying out the frames on the floor first, framing them out in painters tape,etc. I like my method the best. It requires only a little bit of Photoshop skills, and some experience in shopping. I've got both of those down.

First, I drew my fake wall. Complete with baseboards, door casing, and the doorbell. I wanted all my frames to create one large shape, so I drew a rectangle to work within.

Then I filled in my 'frames.' I started with the big rectangular shape in the center and worked my way outward until I liked the layout. I did not measure, I just used my good 'ol common sense to create common sized frames.

I only had one frame that I already owned (the rectangular one in the upper left hand corner), but everything else had to be purchased. I printed out my layout and headed to Michael's and Ikea. Then I grabbed about 2 dozen frames between the two stores and started putting them together. I wanted the frames to be complimentary and uniform - black frame, white matte - with a variety of frame styles. I came across the gold frames at Ikea and grabbed three to liven up the space a bit.



The blue outlined frames are from Michael's and the yellow ones are from Ikea. Ikea had the best price on frames overall, but they only had 2 different styles so we had to mix it up a bit. We used 3M Command picture hanging strips to hang up the smaller frames. The biggest frames were hung on a screw with picture wire. Which will definitely save time with spackling holes in the future!

Three holes in the wall, two trips to Michael's and one visit to Ikea (not counting the extra-frame returns) and the gallery wall had come together.

I love the black frames with the touches of gold, yet it is a large gallery wall in a tight space. So we decided to keep the pictures black and white to not overwhelm the walkway. We waited until the gallery wall was finalized before we ordered up the images. The pictures that we chose to use ended up being a variety of our favorite memories... scenery from our travels, engagement, wedding, friends, and family photos.

Our door bell lays in an unfortunate spot right in the middle of our gallery wall. I painted the cover using leftover Edgecomb Gray paint to make it a little less offensive. It doesn't even bother me anymore!

One very special quote is at the center of it all. This lovely reading was specially chosen to be shared during our wedding ceremony before we exchanged our vows. It is a beautiful quote from Charlotte Bronte's timeless novel, Jane Eyre.

That quote is my favorite part of our new wall.  And the best part? It took me minutes to paint.



I love that this frame wall holds so many special memories for us. I can see it from the kitchen and from our bedroom and will often stop to glance and smile at these beautiful memories of ours. I'm sure these pictures will change a hundred times over the years - but isn't that the fun part to watch lives grow and make new happy memories?

 

 

Do you have any folders in Shutterfly waiting to be dusted off and hung on the wall?