You’ll also notice a few black and white photos that we used to have hanging behind the sofa in our old den in 8 x 10 frames (some of them were now hanging sideways though, so there was still some work to be done on those). Yup I hung it with the wood on the back exposed instead of the front canvas side (I taped a pic of J & I into it a while back and liked the raw kind of rustic look). Except for that backwards canvas on the left. Here we have all of the frames hung without any art. And choosing a big frame for the middle should help things feel kind of balanced and well-planned (even if the edges of the smaller frames around it don’t line up and it’s more of an asymmetrical layout from that big frame on). If you start from the center and work out from there all the frames won’t migrate left or right or up or down as much since you’re starting in the center. Oh and you’ll notice that we started with the big frame in the middle of the arrangement (which we intentionally planned for that spot to sort of balance and ground things) so that’s another tip. Bam, a frame in the exact spot that we had the template. Once the nail’s in the wall in the right place, he rips the paper template from the wall and slips the frame onto the nail. He marks the template with an x, and then just hammers right into that x and through the template. Then he finds the center of the newspaper template and measures down the same amount (4″ in this instance). First John measures down from the top of the frame to see how many inches below the top the nail will actually sit. We already explained the template-making process of creating a frame wall here, but John thought we should throw in a tip about where to put the nail (with pics, because that’s how my brain “eats” info).

We even embraced the whole “layered and different” theme and picked new Ikea frames in varying styles (some more modern and some more decorative or traditional). Although all of the frames aren’t the exact same shade of white, it’s a soft layered look with some creams and other more crisp white tones that just seem to work even though they don’t match perfectly.

As for where the frames came from, we already owned around 10 (originally from Ikea and Target on clearance) and we also picked up 14 new ones from Ikea (thanks to a sweet b-day gift card from the fam). And it only took a few hours of hammering and hammering and hammering and framing random sentimental objects (and my birthday prints) that I lurve. It’s everything we imagined and then some. Yup, after a month of staring at taped up newspaper templates and a big ol’ stack of frames on the floor we finally mustered up the motivation to hang them up, thereby completing the big hallway o’ frames. What possesses DIY folks to work in fits and starts like that? Oh well, who cares, we’re back on the frame-hanging bandwagon now. We just ran out of frame gas or something, so we switched over to console building and chair painting and closet organizing and ceramic dog gluing and tree trimming and sectional leg spray-painting and all the other odd things that we’ve tackled since our little wall-hole-making spree. What’s wrong with us? And it’s not like we weren’t obsessed with the results of the first half of the project (recounted here): Isn’t it strange how you can start a project (in this case the gallery of frames that we wanted to “wallpaper” our hallway walls with) and then just leave the other half of it undone for a month.

Tad carpenter quote