Nailed It!

Gallery walls are popping up all over the blogosphere lately. Here are some of my favorites:


Young House Love


House of Rose


Better Homes & Gardens


7th House on the Left

I love a great gallery wall, and after receiving many frames as gifts last Christmas, I decided it was time to nail those babies to the wall! Sprucing up our small stairwell became my goal.

 

In the photos, you can see that we have textured walls, which I eventually want to remove and replace with smooth drywall and paint, but that's for another day. Anyway, I decided to go with black frames, since it seemed most stores around me had a plethora of black and brown frames, but a limited selection of white ones.

 

I'd like to provide you with a nice tutorial on this installation, but alas, I sort of just winged it. I started by cutting out paper the size of my frames and taping them to the wall to visualize a layout, but then the papers just stayed on the wall for a month or two. Then, I decided to just go for it! What did I have to lose? I hate the walls anyway, so what's a few extra nail holes?!? After nailing a few frames to the wall (about 5), I made rough measurements with a ruler to get even spacing between the frames, but due to my impatience, this quickly turned into eyeballing the placement of the rest of the frames.

As you can see, I still want to purchase a few more frames to fill out the bottom. I also need to fill about 3 frames with some artwork. For the art, I used a mixture of photos, note cards, watercolor paintings, old calendar artwork, and even some sand dollars.

When I needed some more frames, I searched my house and found some cheaper frames that I no longer used, and after some black spray paint, they were perfect for my project. I think the variance in size and frame style makes it interesting.

What do you think? Are you a fan of gallery walls?

Emilia