I do not believe I have ever shared my little cottage’s hallway before. (Or have I? I can't remember...)You see, my home is a very basic rectangle if you were to walk around it, or look at it from up high in the sky. The living room, dining room, kitchen, and laundry room are all across the front in a neat row. Behind that row of rooms is a bedroom on either end, with a hallway and a small office and bathroom sandwiched in the middle of the east side of the hallway. (Linen closets on either end of the east side walls of the hallway, just so ya know.)
(Have I completely confused you yet?)
(I tried drawing a floorplan out to show you, but then I even confused myself, and I live here.)
Anyway, the hallway.
It’s long, and full of doors and doorways! ( Six doors and two doorways)
Oh, and it’s kind of narrow.
I decided it was the perfect place to showcase family photos, and I was concerned that it might look too busy, or make the hallway feel tight if I did them on both sides, so I opted to just do one side of the hallway. I debated about a variety of frame styles, and mix or match, and then came to the conclusion that simple would be best. I went to good ol’ Walmart and got the identical nearly frameless black plastic photo frames in a gajillion sizes, ranging from 4 x6 to 16 x 20.
Then things got a little dicey.
How far down the wall should I go? Originally, I wanted to literally cover the wall in photos, floor to ceiling. After standing in the hallway, hammer in hand, pile of frames all over the floor, I decided it might be too much. If it was too much, I’d have a lot of little nail holes to spackle.
(But then again, it could look aaaah-mazing...you just don't know.)
I jumped on Pinterest for help. After studying roughly a thousand or so hallway family photo galleries, I settled on a band of photos hovering around eye level. I then hung the empty frames. (Empty as in no family photo in them yet.)
I liked what I saw.
Oh! I forgot to share the cool part. Since these frames are so simplistic, (Nearly invisible)and plastic, and from Walmart, they were also so inexpensive! I brought home about $110 in frames, but then returned a pile of them, and in the end, the long hallway gallery ended up costing me under $80 in frames.
I then had to decide if I was doing all black and white photos, all color, or a mix. I ended up going for full color shots in the hallway. (I already have black and white photos in the small bookcase in the dining-living room area…
I used some photos I already had, and then got down to the last eight or ten empty frames.
Then the big challenge was finding a photo I loved, that would fit in the frame the way it was hung. The other challenge was that I wanted to have roughly the same number of photos of each family member up there.
In the end, as with most of my home projects, I let things sit...er...hang on the wall in this case, for a short while (okay, several months...)and then last week I went through my computer one night, and ordered prints from Walgreens to fill the empty frames. Those enlarged photos arrived yesterday and I am now experiencing one of those giddy why-didn’t-I-do-this-sooner? moments in life.
(Do you have those?)
I love walking down the hallway (I keep doing ...) just too look at the photos. The prints were so affordable that I can update them as often as I like.
(Who am I kidding?! It took me nine months to get these pictures in the frames! Ha!)
The jury's still out on whether or not I should go back and fill the wall floor to ceiling...I try to picture it in my mind, and I think it could be fabulous...or not. What do you think?
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