Creating a Gallery Wall

Poor Blank Wall

Design is not my strong suite, so I love to copy other peoples great ideas. I had seen a couple of people create gallery walls in their homes. There were also some examples on Pinterest and Young House Love. The gallery walls spoke of like a cultivated collection of art and I thought it might work in our house. Plus, it meant that we used frames we had, and hopefully it would not be a great big expense.


We have this nice space above one of our IKEA bookshelves on the side of the fireplace that needed some love. The wall originally was the lovely canvas for some stunning 12 inch glass mirrors with gold speckles. Those mirrors really made the house feel like a million bucks, or not. Anyways, we need something that would fill the space without overpowering the nice chocolate color of the fireplace or our hug mirror on the other side. I like the look of black and white photos, and its something I had not seen before, so we decided to go with that instead of color photos. It makes a nice contrast to all the color on the walls and does not compete with it. Instead of picking a specific type of picture, like family, people, places, we went more whatever made a nice photo. Yup we were that picky!

Yup, there are indeed empty frames 

To make the gallery wall, I gathered up all the black and silver frames that we had. I ran out to IKEA and picked up a few more that had different thicknesses. We had some frames from a much smaller collection I had tried to make, but was too small. I liked the matched frame look that most gallery walls have, but instead of trying to make all of the frames exactly the same, I thought it might look a little more me to instead have the same color of photo (black and white) with lots of different frames. 

Schroder helping select picture groupings

The awesome husband hanging up the pictures

I picked black and silver because the room has quite a bit of silver in it already and the black frames make black and white photos look really crisp. I laid the frames out on the table to mess with the placement and relativity to other frames. I put in all the frames we would use, even ones not filled yet. So for the rest of the blog post, please ignore the one picture with the creepy child who is not mine. 


Once I knew where I wanted them to be located, the handsome husband just put them up. We started left to right and just placed them keeping the same configuration and relative distances. I know some people like to hang guidelines up no the wall, but that takes sooooo long and I have nooooooo patience. It worked out just fine anyways. 


I think that the collection looks great. It was a cheap decorating thing that filled up the wall space well. The shape to the whole wall is interesting and makes the wall feel taller. See that's me, looking out for the feelings of the wall. We printed the pictures with a matte finish, so we would not get a shiny look in the light. My only other tip would be to put pictures in them quickly so you don't have to look at creepy photos of people you don't know. 

Close-up of final wall

The wall all hung up