Hi all! I have so many little pockets of my home that I’ve been meaning to share with you, so today I’m going to show you my living room gallery wall. I put it up the night before Milo’s second birthday when I was feeling all soppy about my babies growing up too fast.
When we moved into this house we painted the entire thing Sherwin Williams High Reflective White.
It’s a SUPER bright white (even brighter than their Extra White), and while I love it, I quickly noticed that we had a few giant blank white walls in our home that needed something interesting on them.
Since the walls are a sort of museum white, I really like the look of light wood frames on them. So I opted to do a simple gallery wall in the living room area.
As far as the photos that I chose, that was simple: my family! I had newborn photos done a few days after each birth with both Milo and Dayton. My beautiful friend Kiera shot all of them for me.
An easy trick I’ve found to make gallery walls look cohesive: use black and white photos! Even if the photos aren’t all part of a theme, the gallery wall will look buttoned up and tidy if you use black and white photos.
Here’s the thing about a gallery wall: it looks so simple, but it takes a lot of time to put together!
My first step was selecting the photos. I had dozens to choose from! Photos look great in groups of three, so I chose two rows of three: the top row is Milo, and the bottom row is Dayton.
There were sooo many other photos I wanted to include in the wall, but in the end I wanted a clean and simple wall, so I chose 6 photos total.
Then I selected the size. This was actually a lot harder than I thought it would be! I went to Target and got some 8 X 10 frames, and they were way too small. So I returned those and went up to 14 X 18 frames… Still too small!
I ended up with this frame, which is an 16 X 20 frame that’s matted to fit an 11 X 14 print. I moved up in size twice before picking the right size – it turns out that a few large frames looked SO much better than a bunch of small ones.
(For reference, these walls are 9 feet tall. I really thought the 14 X 18 frame matted to fit 8 X 10 prints would work, but the next size up looked soooo much better!)
I got the photos printed at CVS. Very easy, except I had to make sure that I uploaded really high quality photos. And since these are 11 X 14 photos, they’re technically considered posters. Ha.
And then I hung the frames. Which involved finding a time when both babies were sleeping (8 pm) and I still had energy left (rare) and I felt like measuring and marking and doing math (never). But I did it anyway.
It took about an hour for me to mark and measure and nail the hooks into the wall.
And then I laid on the couch and looked at the photos and thought of how happy I am that Nate and I can know and love both of these precious babies.
Milo’s favorite thing right now is to run up to the wall and say “mommy mommy I show you who’s in those pictures! That’s Dayton and daddy, and that’s Dayton with hisself, and that’s mommy and Dayton…”
I love this little gallery wall! It’s full of some of my favorite people in the world, and I feel such a strong surge of love when I think back to those first few days with each of my babies.
That’s it for now! Just wanted to quickly show you this little corner of my home. Thanks for stopping by. XO.
[…] week when I shared my living room gallery wall, I asked y’all on instagram which home update you wanted to see first. The kitchen update was […]