A Cheap Gallery Wall

Let's get a few things straight to begin with:

1) My preferred method of decorating is with personal family photos. On the whole, I have no use for knick knacks and artwork in my home.

2) I'm extremely cheap when it comes to decorating. When I have money, I either want to eat it, wear it, or buy a vacation with it. I do not want to hang it on my wall. Photo frames can be expensive. I know there are thrift stores and clearance sales, but still, that's money.

3) I don't own my home, therefore, I try to avoid putting holes in its walls.

All of that explains why, about a year and a half ago, I made this:

 

It was inspired by some idea from A Beautiful Mess. It took me a good number of hours--chopping all of my 4x6 prints into squares, matting them with scrapbook paper, and carefully calculating how to create the perfect grid.

I didn't buy anything new to accomplish the original project. This was shortly after I had painted three rooms in the house, so I had some painter's tape left over, and I figured that that would be the perfect way to stick my pictures to the wall. After all, that tape is both designed to stick to walls and to come off without ripping the paint off, too.

I loved my picture wall. The pictures were totally random. Leftover copies of family photos, wedding pictures that hadn't made it into the wedding album, snapshots that I thought I would use in my scrapbook but changed my mind about, and photos that friends and family had given me were all included.

People who came over for our parties liked studying the picture wall, and spotting themselves in a few pictures. It was as if we had a scrapbook on our dining room wall.

Plus, I discovered that after a year and a half, the painter's tape was still holding up and none of the corners were peeling.

However, I wanted more. I'd seen these pictures for so long that I wanted new ones. Angel didn't want me to take any of the old ones down. And when I remembered how headache-inducing creating that grid was, I decided that the perfectly orderly, organized look wasn't for me. And that's how our new, messier, larger, and more overpowering picture wall came to be:

This time I included different sizes of pictures, as well as different sizes and colors of mats. I didn't measure and I didn't calculate. I just stuck pictures up, mixed things around till I liked the look of it. I know it doesn't look all that much bigger in the pictures, but in person, the change is quite noticeable.

I liked my grid of photos, but the messy look is kind of cool, too! I didn't spend anything for this newer version of my picture wall, either, because I still had leftover photo prints that I'd never gotten around to using, and that roll of painter's tape is still holding up.

Call it picture wallpaper, call it a cheapskate's gallery wall, but whatever it is, it's my version of interior decorating.