I have an extremely long wall in my apartment, that has been left untouched since move in day. I'll often sit on the couch watching TV, and my eyes will trail to the unnecessary white space hovering in the room. I'll try to imagine what on earth I'm going to do to fill the space, which usually leads to pure frustration.
I finally thought to myself, enough! And caved on the idea of a gallery wall. I had one in my college apartment a few years ago, so I haven't felt the urge to duplicate the effort, even as the gallery wall swept through the interior design/blog world as the must-do trendy thing to make your apartment chic. Welp, guess this makes my apartment trendy and chic.
I had a large space to fill, and knew from experience that eyeballing square frames on a wall is an absolute nightmare. My mom and I have memories of a full day of arguments to prove it, since she was the lucky one to help me move in to my first apartment at WSU.
I mapped out the area I wanted to use with old Trader Joe's bags, making it as even and square as possible. This is the template of space I was working with, just needing to find the perfect items to fill the interior.
The paper bag outline/template came down off the wall so I could play around with the frames I pulled from various places around my apartment. Mostly out of boxes. Clearly I'm a hoarder. Tetris skills are a big help here, since I arranged and rearranged the picture frame puzzle pieces entirely too many times to count before settling on a pattern that I liked. Once I did, I traced around the frames with a pencil so I'd have a guideline of where to place the nails.
A few frames at a time, I'd pound the nails through the paper, carefully removing the paper around it and hanging the artwork. Tedious & slow, it helps to have some good music on!
The entire project took me about three hours, spread over a few nights. Many of the frames are still unfilled, waiting for the perfect memory to be captured. The photos and art that are already up are a mixture of my black & white photos from college art classes, my mom's wedding photograph (my favorite photograph ever), photos from my travels abroad, and some of my favorite sayings.
I'm so happy with how it turned out!
Ignore the random garbage and cords. Clearly it's an illusion.
Have you done any home improvement or DIY projects lately?
...
