Gallery Wall Progress

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post asking for people to vote on pictures to include on a future gallery wall in our home. Well, two years later, I can finally post the follow up on that one.

Before I knew what it was called, I wanted a gallery wall on the long accent wall that extends from our living room to our dining room. The color we chose (Behr's Ryegrass) went well with the colors in our many photos from Alaska. We had already hung a few Alaska pictures there, and wanted to keep with that theme and add more. We also wanted to stick with natural oak frames, and we didn't want to pay a lot.

Turns out that oak frames are a little hard to come by these days. Several of the stores where I looked didn't have them. We didn't really want to buy them at retail anyway, so we added to our frame collection mostly by shopping garage sales, which definitely helped keep the project inexpensive.

Here is a very low quality before shot, taken during Merrick's birthday party. Excuse all the streamers, balloons and kids. I was so excited to get going on the project that I forgot to take a decent before shot before we started. There are also a few pictures in the post from two years ago.

Before

After

I waited for free offers from online photo print services, and was able to get four free 8 x 10 prints out of the deal. At the end, when it all started to come together, I had the final few prints printed at Sam's Club, and was pleasantly surprised with the quality and price. Less than a dollar for 5 x 7 prints, and under three dollars for an 11 x 17! Hmmm...maybe I should have just had them printed locally in the first place, since it wasn't really that expensive. Oh well, you live, you learn. Free stuff is still good.

I didn't keep track of our costs, but here is my best guess:
Frames: about 7 dollars
Prints: about 9 dollars
Photo Matting: about 9 dollars               TOTAL: Less than 30 dollars!

We also relocated two prints to the far side of the shelf, behind the green chair. The space was looking kind of empty and disconnected before, and adding the pictures there really tied it all together.

I had some inspiration from several other blogs, but we didn't really have a plan for our arrangement, and weren't precise when we were hanging the photos. We just kind of eyeballed it and went for what looked good to us. It was a fun project to do together with Mark over spring break and I'm so happy that it finally came together. It was definitely worth the wait.