If you’ve been to my house sometime during the past year or so, you’ve probably noticed the thoughtfully arranged gallery of frames above the couch. If you bothered to look at if for more than two seconds you probably also noticed that all of those frames were empty. 

Well, no more, my friends! I finally got around to filling those frames with a collection of some of my favorite pictures from the past two years and I could not be happier with it. 

We started with a collection of Ikea Ribba frames. Chris and I stocked up on these during one of our rare trips to Ikea (the closest one is a few hours away) because the frames are so cheap and they have a clean simple style that can work in just about any room. I wasn’t quite sure where I was going to hang them yet, so we just got a variety or sizes and colors. 

After those frames sat in our garage for a few months, I got around to thinking about a gallery arrangement over our couch. I tried a tip I had seen some time ago about using tissue paper or newspaper templates to plan out a gallery wall. You simply trace the outline of your frames on some old newsprint, cut out the shapes, and tape the templates to your wall. Moving pieces of paper is much easier than moving nail holes for the actual frames and it gives you a much better sense for how the arrangement will work in your space. Once you have the arrangement down, you can nail straight through the paper to avoid any measuring and rip the paper off the wall before hanging your frames. It worked great, and it made it really easy to create the balanced but non-symetrical arrangement I was hoping for. 

My dad helped us get all the frames hung on the wall one afternoon while he was visiting. You can see him nailing through the last newspaper template here. 

Fast forward about a year. After having those empty frames hanging over my head for all that time, I finally got around to printing some pictures when I was planning for my ProjectLIfe book. I added a couple larger prints we had from an old professional family photoshoot and piece of Charlie’s artwork to fill up the other big frame, and voila! my gallery wall was finally complete!

Granted, it’s basically a Wall of Charlie right now, so eventually we’ll need to switch out some pictures to reflect the new member of our family who will be joining us. But for now I think it does a great job of capturing the different aspects of Charlie’s personality and our memories together as a family over the years.

Seeing these pictures out and in the open in our living room makes me so happy!