Photo Wall

I pinned this awesome photo wall a long time ago and totally forgot about it.  Last week, I was going through my "For the Home" board, trying to find some new decorating projects I could try for little to no money and saw this pin.  Now, I'm a bit of a photo freak.  I LOVE photographs and having them all over my home.  My biggest complaint about our house has been that there's not enough wall space for all of the pictures I want to hang.

So last week, I spent some time going through closests and drawers and storage and collecting all of the picture frames I had.  I did buy a $3.00 8 x 10 at Walmart and a .50 small frame at the Salvation Army, but all the rest of them were ones I already had laying around.  I tend to pick them up at garage sales during the summer to hang on to for whenever I might need them. Glad I did!  I painted some of the wood ones with the blue paint that we used on our family room wall, the green paint from our living room wall, and the pink spray paint I've used for a couple of accent pieces.

Once the frames were all painted and the photos all collected, we got to work laying out a plan.  I had some leftover brown packing paper from our body mapping project last week and, as luck would have it, it just happened to be almost the exact same size as the wall.  It was just short about 6 inches at the top.  We laid that out on the floor and then arranged the photos how I wanted them on the paper.

Once we had the lay out done, I then used a marker to put a dot on the paper where each nail should go.  Then we taped the paper up on the wall and the husband hammered the nails over the marks I made while the 20 year old and I put all of the pictures in their frames (in the picture above, the photographs are just laying on top of the frames).  I had taken a picture of the layout on the paper so we knew where each photo should go on the wall as well.

There were a few frames that didn't have hangers on the back so I used another ingenious Pinterest trick for that...a pop can tab as a photo hanger!  We couldn't screw into the frames, like in the link, so we just used the go-to lazy person's solution...duct tape!

This morning, two of the heavier frames had fallen so I'm going to have to use something a bit stronger, I'm thinking I'll super glue the pop tab on and then duct tape again, but the tiny frames are holding up just fine.

We got all of the frames hung up and then I rolled some painter's tape and stuck that behind a lot of them to keep them from hanging crooked.  Here's the wall before....

And here's my new photo wall.....

I absolutely love it!!  I love the pops of color, I love the artsy collage look, and most of all I love the fact that we can display more of our family photos in a pretty way.  I have pictures of all of the kids as babies, pictures of my grandparents when they were a young couple, high school pictures of my parents, and pictures of myself as a child.  What a great family history wall!  I wish I had some pictures of the husband when he was little but hopefully I can eventually get some and add those as well.  This has been one of my very favorite Pinterest ideas that I have tried so far!  I want to fill every wall in our house with photos now, but that might be just a bit too much??