Carm's Creative Vision: Never Ending Gallery Wall Project

It's been 7 months since I last published a post. Life is still crazy (understatment! 2017 has been the most challenging year I've ever endured), but now it's because I have an awesome new job and not because I'm commuting for three hours a day. Somehow, even with all the extra time I had once my commute changed, I really didn't work on a whole lot of projects.

I did however finish a two and a half year project finally came to fruition when we moved to our new place. My focus and effort towards this project were severely lacking for entirely too long (like the entire two years in the old place) and then one day all the ideas just clicked into place. I absolutely love the idea of a gallery wall, which I decided was exactly the way to showcase all the cool craft pieces and pictures we've acquired and all of our wonderful pictures. I even received some nice canvas pictures for Christmas (two years ago...) which had yet to find their place on our walls.

Once I decided I was going to work on this project when we first moved into our old place in the summer of 2015, I began collecting picture frames. Out of date metal? Doesn't matter and it is cheap from a resale shop, which sounds great! Cool texture? Wonderful! I started out with only a few frames I picked up randomly...

I spent around $16.50 for all these frames, which are all solid and functioning wonderfully.

And since nothing matched I decided that spray painting them would be the best option in addition to the fact that I planned to supplement these with plain black frames. I'm not a fan of matte black so I went with a gloss finish. Here was step one of the many rounds of spray paint:

They look so strange from this picture but they will look so pretty when I am done :)

The wooden frames were of course much easier to spray-paint. The paint stuck well and didn't look gloppy or runny, but it did take multiple coats. I decided after that I was going to go the really cheap route and get plastic frames for a nice low price since I didn't really care about the quality of the frames. But once I got the frames (a whole $7 for a lot of frames...) I realized the blacks didn't look the same and that irritated the perfectionist in me. So I decided to spray-paint those frames too. But those frames needed more paint in little, even coats to look nice, and then I found other frames to add to the mix... and on my garage floor they stayed. And stayed... for almost two full years.

Then I began to collect other things as well. The picture below was stage 2 of like 8 within the brainstorm process. I laid everything I had out on the floor, which gave me great ideas about how they could all fit together and where I was still lacking. The wooden sign was given to us for Christmas last year, the "R & C" I made a while back and kept adding wine corks to, the pictures are honestly a little old now but were printed and ready to go. I realized that this would be the perfect opportunity to showcase my partner's flag and picture from when he was in the military since we have absolutely nothing from then up either (pictured at the bottom left).

Getting closer!

After spending time (okay like hours wondering....) at Michael's I knew I found the right details to fill in some of the gaps. Once I figured out the right arrangement I had to figure out how to get everything up on the wall in order with decent spacing. The good thing is that I really don't think a gallery wall is supposed to be perfect. I did measure a lot of these items, to figure out proximity and to make sure my wall didn't end up with everything in the corner and nothing on the other side.

Finally the right fit!

Once I started getting everything up, it was quick moving because everything was around the same height. I moved things in sections, the umbe board column first, then the next column with the red shirt picture. The harder part was the "R & C" section. I had to treat it as just one since the sections overlapped with each other. And then the last section I was about 3 hours into trying to figure all of this out and so I pretty much threw it on the wall as quickly as possible.