Home Decor Project: Gallery Wall

The first time I ever saw a gallery wall was on Pinterest (of course) and I fell in love (Young House Love has an incredible tutorial on this as well). I went on a pinning spree of ideas, knowing I wanted something like that in our new house.

See, because I take pictures everywhere, we had a million picture frames hung about the house. They seemed scattered and disjointed so I wanted to unify them to tell our story.

The project started by rounding up all of said picture frames (mostly still in boxes at the time).

I then took all of the pictures out of their frames to prep for painting. The main thing, I think, that makes the gallery wall so dynamic is the uniformity of the frames. So I decided to take all of our odds and ends frames and paint them all white.

Before painting I brought all of the frames out to the back porch, laid out a drop cloth (which felt reminiscent of a Dexter kill scene), and taped all of the frames that I needed to be extra careful painting.

I spray painted 3 white coats on every frame…until I ran out of spray paint. Ugh.

Because I am not one to leave a project unfinished, I found our all purpose white paint (so glad we bought that!) and hand painted the rest of the bare frames.

I left everything outside to dry for 2-3 hours. When the frames were dry I brought them inside and laid them out on our office floor to get an idea of size/shape of our frame wall.

I put all of the pictures back in and arranged the frames on the floor in the way we wanted to hang them.

Then we got started on the gallery wall!

It took a lot of measuring and leveling.

In progress!

It also took a lot of mounting tape.

And we had to tear off the backs of most of the frames to get them to hang right on the wall.

But in the end it was worth it because it looks really good.

I think it’s off to a great start and can’t wait to add to it!

What do you think??