Building a Gallery Wall

Settling into a place is an ongoing process, I find. Back in June, we were freshly into our new place and I was all excited about my own little space up in my room. It's a great little spot! For the last few months, that bird print has been hanging there all alone and recently, I've decided that it needed a little company.

The thing about having an open format home is that there are fewer walls to hang things. So, I've decided to get around that by organizing gallery walls to display the art that I've amassed. I have grand plans for this gallery idea for a few walls around the house, but since this is a new sort of project for me, I decided to start in my own room. This way, if there's a learning curve, it'll happen in an easily-fixed wall up where fewer eyes will see.

So, for the bedroom gallery, I decided that the pictures would be of places Hubby and I have visited a as well as some of the more artistic shots of Chicago that I've taken over the time I've lived here. First step was printing them all out in various sizes.

I've been collecting frames for a while. It's funny, in the online how-to-put-together-a-gallery-wall tutorials, they all seem to say things like, "take all the frames you've got lying around..." and I just laugh 'cuz I don't know anyone who has THIS many frames just sitting around. So, for the last while, I've been visiting the thrift shops, scouring clearance and watching the sales to get up a supply of frames.

Next, I put all the pictures into the frames. After all the planning and plotting and collecting, it was really nice to see some visible progress (and finally some organizing of all my piles of frames).

The best suggestion for assembling a wall of photos and being sure about the placement of things, that I found, was to cut the shape of each photo you want to use from brown paper and then arrange them manually on the wall until you're pleased with it. A little old school, but it seems the best idea since I don't have any fabulous computer programs to do it for me. Here they are laid out for cutting:

Then came the exciting part: playing with papers on the wall. I really liked using the paper and painter's tape; it was so easy to move things around and tweak the arrangement to my liking! All in all, I was satisfied after only four different configurations.

Once I was happy with the formation, I waited overnight, just to be sure that it really was what I wanted (there were going to be an awful lot of nails after all). Then, all that was left was to replace the papers with the actual frames.

Just for reminder's sake, here's the before:

and Voila! 

Overall, I am greatly pleased. It really changes that whole side of the room. I love how the pictures tie-in the lamp and the chair. Yes, very happy.

 I'd say the whole process was actually a lot easier than I'd imagined. For fear of its being a real bear to do, I'd been putting off this project for a good while, but once I got started it really went quite quickly. 

Now... on to the next walls!