Putting Up A Gallery Wall

In the Fall when my sister-in-law and I went to Ikea I bought 15 white frames because I knew I wanted to do a gallery of pictures we took on our honeymoon on this wall between the Craft Room and Bedroom #1.  Once I started planning this out I realized I needed 2 more so I picked them up at Ikea and printed 17 pictures.  But with the final arrangement we again need 2 more frames.  So I just put the order in at Costco and this week I am making another trip to Ikea for more frames.

It took me until February to pick the pictures and get them printed and up on the wall.  Only a four month wait which isn't too shabby.  The LED lighting kicked me into high gear.

I printed them at Costco and the prices were really reasonable.  I spent about $14 on all these pictures and $6 of that was just from the 3 big prints.  I just printed 5 more prints  today (3 are wedding pictures for a different wall) and it was only $2.50.

I just totaled up what I spent on frames at Ikea and with the two I am going to buy this week it totals $95.81 (plus tax) for 19 brand new frames.  So the total for art for this wall is about $120.  Not too bad!

I spent an evening getting them all in their frames:

The 3 big ones were tricky because the matting wasn't the right size for what I printed, but I didn't want no matting.  So I taped the picture to the front of the matting.  Here's what it looks like:

I flipped it over so you can see how small it would have been if I would have put it behind the matting:

They sat gathered up on the dining room table awaiting their hanging:

 

And just to show you how badly we need to reinforce our floors, as I was pacing for steps one night (I have a FitBit and shoot for 10,000 steps a day) the whole stack fell over and onto the floor.  The shaking floor shook the table and knocked over the stack!  Luckily nothing broke, there are just some chips that I need to touch up with some white paint.

I traced out all the frames on brown paper grocery bags, cut them up, and used painters tape to put them up on the wall.  The wall went through many iterations:

Then Corey took a crack at it (he loosened it up a bit which was hard for me to do with my symmetry issues) and we ended up with this lovely final arrangement:

Corey made a mark for the nail on the brown paper template and then drilled through the paper (I don't know why the one shot I got of him drilling doesn't have the paper there...) before hammering in the nail.  He pre-drilled the holes because of our lathe and plaster walls.

And here's a shot of Crater Lake without the glare:

Speaking of Crater Lake, maybe I should mentioned where we went on our honeymoon.  All of these shots were taken by either Corey or me while we were in the Pacific Northwest.  We flew into Seattle and rented a car and meandered our way down to San Francisco and flew out from there.  These shots were taken at one of these places: Seattle, Washington; Lake Quinault, Washington; Ruby Beach, Washington;  Mt. Rainier National Park, Washington; Crater Lake, Oregon; The Portland Rose Garden, Oregon; Council Crest Park, Oregon; Redwood Forest, California; and a random beach in California at sunset

The two extra that I printed are of another Washington wildflower and another shot of Ruby Beach.

My plans for the wall below the pictures is to have a little console table.  I am working on the plans to build one!

Stay tuned for more art going up on the walls!  We put up two more things the same day as this gallery wall and I have plans for four frames in the living room on other walls.  Plus we are working on art for the bathroom!