Adventures in Remuddling

It’s been over a year since we’ve moved into our home. Recently we’ve begun to think about frivolous things such as hanging up pictures. We currently have a blank wall space above our living room sofa measuring about seven feet wide and five feet tall. For inspiration, Pottery Barn has an entire book devoted to displaying photos. Apartment Therapy had some good information, including a post about a company that sells a packaged system for your picture hanging project. Of course, we opted for the do-it-yourself route.

First, we decided on simple IKEA Ribba frames because they were reasonably priced, and because this is a budget project (not aspiring to be the Met here). To go even cheaper, we could shop thrift stores and collect our frames over time. Given that everything takes us way longer than we imagined, we thought it best to take the easy route and design with stock frames. I took down the measurements of all the various frame sizes and then got to work designing.

Tig whipped out his computer aided drawing program and outlined a seven foot by five foot rectangle (roughly the size of our living room wall). Then he drew one of each frame size and made multiple copies of each. After he was satisfied, he printed the computer drawings and labeled each frame size. We cut the frames out with low-tech scissors (yes, we could have accomplished the same thing with graph paper and pencil). Here I am arranging the frames in various configurations in the “wall space”.

This first arrangement is inspired by a photo I came across while hopscotching around the web. The blogger also has a post describing how she and her husband hung the pictures in this arrangement (just a warning, there’s some adult language in her post). Although I loved how it looked, I thought it might be better suited for our dining room, which has a more formal look.

Option 1

The second option requires one of those ledges where frames are propped up against the wall. For those of you who like this type of arrangement, Pottery Barn has a free pdf template on their website. Check it out. Although this arrangement had the right look and feel for the living room, it felt too flexible and vulnerable to a sweep of the arm or an errant flying object (hey, you never know). I could imagine a domino of pictures tumbling down from the ledge.
Option 2

I liked this last arrangement the best, an ecclectic mix of differing sized frames which will be tied together by the same frame color and style. We may have to splurge on some custom matting, depending on the size and content of our chosen pictures.

Option 3

Tig took the arrangement and finalized it on the computer. Here is our freebie, for those who are interested, a pdf template of our designed picture frame layout (click below on the thumbnail, or here). This requires the free PDF reader.

Now that we know what to do, the next step is natural: procrastinate.