Building a Wall Gallery...Very Slowly.

Now that we've got the Billy hack done... I have been jonesing to create my very own picture wall gallery. Pinterest has some amazing inspiration as usual, and I'd saved a ton of ideas.

Funny how when you start actually gathering what you have around the house and putting it all together, then taping up the cutout newspaper shaped like your pictures, things seem to come together.

Then they don't. Once I had all my stuff pinned up, I felt like it was closing in the room a bit. Our living/dining room is like a 'great room' but it's like the world's tiniest 'great room'. I think it's something like 18x40. And maybe that seems big but we have a lot of large-scale furniture from our old place which had really high ceilings...and many times it just feels cluttered in here.

So I removed some of the items at the suggestion of a friend. It looked better. Then I started putting up the pictures. And found that even though the newspaper looked great all pinned up, when I started putting frames up to see it in real-life, it wasn't totally jiving with the paper templates. So I closed a few things in and moved a few things around.

And came up with this so far.

Originally I wanted to do all white frames and sunburst but we kind of like the contrast. I actually painted the two light brown frames black and am painting a few other frames white/black to make the balance a little better but we are going to leave it b/w for a while and see what we think. And when we get sick of it (if?), I can paint it all white. Or all black. Or turquoise. Because that's the beauty of spray paint. Which I actually haven't posted about yet but I am firmly on that obsessed bandwagon. How did I never know about this before? So simple.

In any case, we are LOVING the Billy hack and the wall gallery thus far. I don't even mind that it's not totally finished because I am kind of digging the raw look and some of the open back frames and all that. Now if I can just get my husband to pull the Billy away from the wall and snake my new lamp cords behind the thing so we can get some real light into the room, I'd be an ecstatic girl.

Oh did you catch my new turquoise/aqua lamps hiding off on the edges? Those are from Home Goods...my other new obsession. $29.99 each. Perfect way to bring a little bit of new color into this room. Love.