My 10 Minute Gallery Wall

I have said this many times; my house is a fixer upper. We knew this when we bought it 4 years and and we are nowhere nearly done with what needs doing. Actually, we’re probably not even 10% of the way done but we had Erin earlier than expected and work suddenly stopped. Anyway, one of my most hated rooms in the house is the living room. It’s about 25ft long with an additional bit coming off to make an L shape. When we moved in most of the house had been painted white and the living room is no exception. I hate white! It’s so boring and the room lacked any kind of personality or warmth.

As the room is so large there is a lot of space on the walls, which makes the white just that little bit more annoying. It’s everywhere. There are plenty of options though for how to make some changes. You could add picture rails with some big framed prints, put up shelves or maybe get a big hand painted canvass, which could look really beautiful.

A couple of weeks ago I had our handyman come and put some big pictures up and after he’d gone, he gave me the confidence to try to do something myself. I have always wanted a gallery wall but wasn’t quite sure where to put it or how to even go about putting one up.

So, as soon as the handyman had left I found the Command strips I had in a drawer and set to work. We have a large white photo frame which holds 10 pictures and says MEMORIES in the middle so this was my first piece to start with. Command strips are really easy to use if done properly so hanging this frame took a matter of minutes after I’d figured out where it was going to go.

Now, I should probably say here that it’s best to work out your gallery wall beforehand and there are loads of great tutorials on YouTube. However, I didn’t do this at all. I just winged it! After putting up the first frame, albeit slightly off centre and slightly wonky, I was so happy that I wanted to do more. I went off to look in our tool box to see what else we had laying around.

It turns out that we still had the little box of picture hooks that Halifax sent us when we bought our house 4 years ago. I already had some other beautifully framed photos of Erin from back when we went to Baby Sensory so I didn’t have to spent time deciding what I wanted hanging or even having to go out and buy extra frames. I also had a couple of spare frames from something else so I was able to add more straight away.

Although I didn’t really plan the big frame I did try to measure and plan the others a little more. After having a quick measure to figure out where I wanted the frames at the side I popped in a nail and hook and hung my first picture, following on the other side.

Next, I measured where the middle of the large frame was and hung another picture underneath this spot, leaving a bit of a gap. I think it’s in the middle but it’s probably off slightly! I then measured roughly either side of this frame so that the other 2 were roughly equal distances apart.

Lastly, my 2 spare frames went above the large frame. They don’t match the other frames at all but I don’t actually care. I like that they’re not all matching and I like that I can add something else to it if I want to as well.

My gallery wall really did only take about 10 minutes to put up. It wasn’t half as hard as I thought it would be and I am so happy with the results. Yes, some of the pictures could have probably been measured better but for my very first attempt I couldn’t be happier. I would definitely do this again elsewhere in the house as I really think it adds something special to what was once a really boring and lifeless room!