New Gallery Wall

It has taken me six months, but I finally put up the gallery wall in our apartment.  


If you remember, I had one up in our old apartment in DC.  It looked like this:

I hadn't ever done a gallery wall before, but the assortment of frames felt like an excellent way to draw attention away from the odd shape of the wall there.  


I liked it so much that when I took it down, I knew I'd be creating one again once I got to Burlington.  Here, we have so much more wall space.  There was no particular location that needed to be filled and no space that felt like exactly the right size. 


Everywhere seemed either too big or too small.  Or somewhere that people would never see. 


After a while, I lit on the idea of putting all the frames up on one wall in the dining room but hanging them in one specified area - a stripe of sorts.  That would solve the problem of the immensity of the open wall space without requiring me to fill the entire thing.  


And I think it turned out really well. 


First I taped off the area that I wanted to fill.  I tried to make the tape moderately straight, but it didn't need to be perfect because it was just a guide. 

Then, in front of the wall, I laid out all the pieces that I wanted to hang and arranged and re-arranged them until they looked like I wanted. 

The last time I was very careful and created templates first so that I'd be sure I was hanging everything in exactly the right place. 


I didn't go that route this time, in part because I didn't have a sofa in the way like I did at the DC apartment.  Here, I could see exactly where each piece would be going because it was laying on the floor underneath.  And that worked out just fine.

Then I peeled off the tape. 


And voila.

Some folks like to have a unifying element in their gallery walls - all the same color frames or type of frame or a clear theme of the pieces.  

I like the more organic look of different colored and styled frames.  We're not super matchy around here so I think a wall where all the frames went together might look a little out of place.  And of course, this works better for my lazy style of decorating.

I'm very pleased with how it all turned out, and I've found myself gazing at it lovingly - much like I did with Liesl when she arrived.  Now either way I look, there's something that makes me smile.  Seems like a decorating win to me!

Katie