Create A Gallery Wall... the kind that doesn't look crazy.

Wow what a weekend! I hope yours was great! I met with six of my seven sisters for a gut laughing fest. We desperately missed my one sis that couldn’t make it, it wasn’t the same without her, but I haven’t had that much fun for a long time.

And now the blog… I love gallery walls. Although they add variety and are a great way to display memories or momentous, they can be tricky suckers to put together. I have wanted to create a picture gallery for a while but unfortunately sometimes I feel like my artistic side has yet to manifest itself. Sometimes I get help or bag the idea, because I fear artistically I can’t pull it off. After pouring over different gallery walls I decided there are two main decorating themes that help a gallery wall not look crazy with the idea that you can incorporate different sizes, styles and shapes if you have enough uniformity to make it not hodge-podgey:

1. Create a perimeter around your gallery

2. Use frames with the same color. I tried to pull off the true eclectic gallery wall, but in the end I spray painted all frames white. I like true eclectic galleries, but mine just looked inartistic and painful.

I have a big open space in my kitchen. I want to build bookshelves in the space, but my bff is giving me a big thumbs down, afraid of the clutter (it might happen one day though, the bookshelves, not the clutter). The bane of this space is an eye-sore intercom system. We use and love it, I just think it’s ugly. Decorating around permanent unwanted things in your house can be hard, but the best thing to do is work around them as if they are not there. Originally I put up some pics of the kids, and I think we can all agree it is sub-par.

It had to go. I gathered all the usable frames, travel relics and signs from around my house. Don’t be afraid to use atypical items in the gallery, the face mask is from a business trip to Fiji that was hand carved and gives super cool texture and variety. I only had to buy one frame for this project, and I got it from the dollar store! After you have stuff to work with, measure and mark out the dimensions on the floor with yarn or rope. I also included a newspaper marking the spot of the intercom:

Rearrange the frames until you like it, staying within the perimeter:

I kept an even perimeter and three lines through the gallery, note the blue lines below:

I spray painted all the frames white (sweet side yard right!?):

And with a level marked the lines with yarn on the wall, used my favorite hanging trick and hung the photos:

In the end it was true love.