Our Favorite Gallery Wall

Usually we build up to the big reveal, this time, we want to show off from the start!

Taking up this long hallway wall, we couldn’t be more pleased with the way this gallery wall has turned out.  Friends and family, strangers, pretty much everyone that sees it, compliments this wall and asks for the details.  Well, here they are!

Our initial inspiration came from this photo in the Book Island Life: Inspirational Interiors.

The idea was born!  What now?  Our first task was to find the shelves to rest the photos on.  The most simple, inexpensive, and easy to connect (everyone needs different lengths) were the IKEA RIBBA Picture Ledges.  We love when we can get something for under $10!  After measuring the wall and doing some quick math, we were back home and hanging them.  (In all fairness, due to the need for perfectly level shelves, we asked our finish carpenter to help us.  Hey, we can’t do everything ourselves!)

After the shelves were hung, the hunt for frames began.  Sticking to a similar palette as the inspiration photo, we were able to re-purpose some of our old Pottery Barn frames.  We also visited IKEA, Target, Aaron Brothers, Michaels, Hobby Lobby, and World Market.  The goal was to look like we had collected frames from around the world and we accomplished this through a mixture of textures, materials, and styles.  Staged eclectic?  Faux global?  Oh well…

Finally, with all the frames collected, we were ready to build the wall.  There are many ways one could go about completing this, but we arranged all the frames prior to putting photos in.  Here is what it looked like when we were deciding where everything would go.

Once we liked the composition of the wall, checking that all the frames were overlapped but still showing their photos, and that two similar frames weren’t near each other, we were ready for pictures!

We made a list organized by size and orientation (vertical or horizontal) and then filled in the blanks.  This is what our “schematic” looked like.  Also, we made sure to take a photo of the wall before we started taking it down.  Otherwise we wouldn’t have known how to put it back together!

Finally, we filled our frames and re-assembled everything.  We live in California and the wall is over a hardwood floor.  To make sure it was earthquake safe, we anchored all the frames touching the wall and then used earthquake putty to secure the leaning frames.  This was the part that took the longest – we just wanted to be done!

Here is another look at the finished product.  Enjoy!