Spring is in the air and summer is right around the corner, which means spring cleaning and updating your space with new, fresh designs for the season! So today I wanted to share with all of you lovely momma’s out there how to update your space with a gallery wall in three simple steps.
There’s nothing I love more for home decor than to showcase our family photos. We have a ton of different themed gallery walls, but let’s be honest…they’re mostly just of our son, Greyson.
Small or large photographs and artwork can have a major design impact within any space, especially when hung together to create a themed gallery wall. I love pictures and I love getting professional photographs taken. So once we have a little shoot, I’m always finding a new wall to create a gallery. My husband usually asks me why I’m not just swopping the old photographs out, but that’s no fun! I want our entire home to be decorated with our story. So today I hope I can help you create a beautiful gallery wall to tell your story.
1. Choose Your Theme
The first step to any beautiful gallery wall is choosing a theme. Like I mentioned, I like to have images taken throughout the seasons of our family or different events. So I typically like to immediately create a theme from our photoshoot. An eclectic mix works great as well. If you want your gallery wall to be cohesive, pick a theme and color scheme. Such as your kids, family vacations, your wedding, 1st birthday, exotic travels, you name it.
2.Plan Your Gallery Wall
The next step is choosing your frames, art and layout. This seems like a lot of steps in one, but you have to do this all together as they need to relate to one another. I love any and all gallery walls, some with an eclectic mix of photographs, paintings and prints that take over an entire wall and that aren’t perfectly hung at the same levels and others that are perfectly hung in one solid colored frame with black and white photos.
Within our dining room, I bought 12 large Home and Garden white frames (that cost me $8) and placed 8×10 black and white prints of our wedding, placing four across and three down. I’m not going to lie, this made it a little difficult to hang perfectly, but I’m going to share with you how I did it!
When thinking about my layout, I always clear out the living room floor and lay my gallery down on the floor. And I make sure I’m doing this during Greyson’s nap time! Or he would definitely create his own layout, haha!
If you are going for a more eclectic mix, start by taking your main giant focal point piece, slightly off centering and then work your way around that piece with the prints. The size of your wall and the furniture that surrounds the room will depend on how you want to layout your gallery wall.
If you have a large chair, couch or lamp that will be part of that wall, make sure to incorporate that into your art. You don’t want anything to be hidden. And you want to make sure that it all flows together. You don’t want all of your large and tall pieces on one side and not the other. Off balance your gallery with different shapes and sizes, and make sure your eye is drawn throughout your wall. Hang the additional frames around your statement piece. Go with horizontal and vertical, all different shapes and sizes. Smaller pieces are always nice to fill in as well to keep your eyes bouncing around your gallery.
3. Hang
Once you’ve chosen your perfect pieces and know how your going to lay it out, it’s time for the fun part… watching it all come together. Time to hang your piece of work!
Once you’ve created your layout on the floor, measure, level and hang. The gallery wall style you are hanging will depend on how to hang perfectly. Before I remove my assortment on the floor, I always take a picture. Because you will forget what went where. If I go with an eclectic assortment, I’m not going to lie, I just go for it, looking at my arrangement on the floor or my picture. But if you’re doing a clean and even look like I did with our dining room, having four frames across and three down, you need to make sure they are even.
Keep at least three inches in-between all of the frames. Being we have our dining room table in front of the gallery wall, I wanted to be sure the frames were just high enough over the table so that you were able to see the images. Leave eight inches between the top of the furniture and the bottom of the frames.
To center your frames perfectly on a wall, first measure the length of the room, finding exactly where the middle of the wall is, placing a small dot with a pencil. Then measure 1.5″ over from the dot to the right and 1.5″ from the dot to the left, making a couple additional small pencil marks. That will be your placement for the outer edges of your middle two photographs. Using a level, ensure your dots for each frame are at the same height, making four small dots across. Again using your level, measure down and up from each dot, placing three marks vertically. Once you have your dots for where the nails need to go, get your hammer out and get your pictures framed!
Now the trouble with a perfectly straight gallery wall is that the frames never stay straight. Whether it’s someone bumping into them or the house shaking, they always seem to shift a little. Here’s my secret. You know those clear cabinet bumper things you put on your cabinets so your doors don’t get dinged when they hit another door? I put those behind our frames and they never move! They are amazing! They don’t wreck your paint, they’re clear, and easy to remove. Or poster putty works great as well!
So there you have it! Our dining room gallery wall! Hope you can take a tip or two away and freshen up your space with a beautiful gallery wall to tell your family’s story.
