It’s a Christmas miracle!  I finished my gallery wall.  About two weeks ago I felt like I was going to have frames laying on my living room floor for years, but this weekend I bit the bullet and made it happen.  A gallery wall of this size is not for the faint of heart.  You have to buy approximately 5,000 frames and all of the art that the world has and then it still probably isn’t enough.  But that’s ok, because it has completely transformed our family room.  Like Megan mentioned before, I bought some art while we were in France with the intention of making a gallery wall.  I was going to make the whole thing French themed, and while it mostly is, I also included some other art that I just happen to like.  I also printed out some of the pictures I took while we were there; my favorite is still that one of Corey in front of the Eiffel Tower.  I bought some art from Etsy and other online vendors and also made a couple of things when I realized that I didn’t have enough and was ready to get the freaking thing done.  If you guys are interested in a certain piece, let me know and I will post the source because there are too many items to post them all (and also I’m lazy and want to eat my dessert soon).  One thing that was super helpful to me was this post from Emily Henderson about inexpensive frames.  I used some Ribbas from Ikea, a couple of Pottery Barn, two of these gold beauties, and a whole lot of these Framatic ones that are absolutely my favorite.  The double mat is so nice looking and the design makes it so easy to put the pictures in and hang them.  Love.

I was so scared about the actual hanging of the frames on the wall but it turned out that that was pretty much the easiest part after I found all of the art and frames and figured out where I wanted them to go.  The trick is to roll out long pieces of kraft paper (you can buy them in rolls from Lowes) as large as the area on your wall that you want to cover.  I decided to cover from the light switches up to 3 inches from the top of the wall.  Then measure and draw out on your kraft paper any light switches/ hvac monitors/ etc on the wall to make sure you don’t try to put frames on top of them.  Lay out your art until you feel happy with how it looks, then outline each frame and measure where the nail will go.  Tape the kraft paper back up on the wall and then hammer in the nails on the marked locations.  Once Corey helped me tape back up the paper (we had two separate sections of paper since it was such a large area), it only took me about an hour to hammer in the nails and hang up the art.

Sorry for the blurry picture.  Don’t know what happened there.