Gallery Wall

House projects continue to consume our time. I’m sure it will be that way for awhile! Over the holidays we finished painting/hardwood flooring the bedrooms and also squeezed in painting the hallway. There wasn’t much time to enjoy the fruits of our labor before moving on to the next project: The Wall.

We’ve been itching to tear down that wall ever since we first saw the house. It separates the front living room area, which gets glorious sunlight, and the family room/kitchen area where we spend most of the time. The wall just isn’t necessary since we aren’t the type of people to have a formal living room. So that continues to be a work in progress. Although the wall is down now we still need to clean up the edges.

Among the chaos I thought I’d find solace in finishing a room… the hallway. If you can count that as a room. The hallway starts at the front door, takes you through the house, and drops you off at the bedrooms. Just painting the dingy walls and getting rid of the gold fixtures made me extremely happy.

Now up near the front door the hall opens up into….. a large standing area? The space is really unnecessarily large. I guess it’s nice for welcoming guests. Sure, we’ll go with that.

I knew I wanted to do a gallery wall someplace in the house. They’re all the rage right now. You’ll just have to trust me on that. In our old house we used the wall along the staircase for this. Since we no longer have a staircase I had to find another spot. Enter unnecessarily large space in the hallway.

I credit this next idea to someone else… probably something I saw on Pinterest. Instead of just hanging pictures randomly I cut out pieces of paper to plan out where I’d hang my frames. I thought this would be terribly tedious but it actually wasn’t so bad.

My Christmas poinsettias are still going strong!

The tedious part was hanging up the frames. Why do 4×6 frames need TWO wall anchors? It just adds an extra step of hanging to use a level. So annoying.

I’m not sure how much time this actually took me, but I gave myself a Sunday to casually work on it. So there we are. A lot of the pictures are kind of random- most of them seem to fall in the category of art or pictures from our trips together. For example that picture in the middle left. Yes, the promiscuous one. That was a piece of art we picked up in Portland. It was done by a local artist and if you look closely the drawing is made up entirely of small numbers. It’s pretty neat.

Zoom out a bit and here’s our new entry area.We tried to make it functional. Now when people visit they have a place to hang their coats.

Speaking of that coat rack. I’m pretty into it. I picked it up on Amazon. When not in use it hangs as an inconspicuous wall sculpture/art. The hooks flip down to hold coats as needed. So clever.